
Glass. 
Book. 



Copyright N°- 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT; 






Conservation of the Spiritual Life 

As Taught by St* John. 



BY 

MARCUS L/GRAY 
A Member of the Missouri Conference 




£ V+&> I 

Grlo 7T 



Copyright by 

M. L. GRAY, 

CHILLICOTHE, MISSOURI 

1912. 



BECKTOLD PRINTING AND BOO&yMFG. CO 
St. Louis, Missou 



©CU3 01)259 



DEDICATION: 

To the Woman who said 

-Yes" 

To a sudden, embarrassing question. 



CONTENTS. 
I. 

PAGB 

Conservation of Our Natural Resources 9 

II. 

The Spiritual Resources of the Church as 

Taught by St. John; His Preparation 15 

III. 
Conservation of the Doctrine of the Divin- 
ity of Christ as Taught by St. John 21 

IV. 
St. John's Conservation of the Doctrine of 
the Divinity of Christ as Evidenced 

by His Self-Manifestation 33 

V. 

Conservation of Spiriturl Fertility 4 

VI. 

Spiritual Erosion 57 

VII. 
Conservation of Essential Spiritual Ele- 
ments; Truth 65 

VIII. 

Half-Truths and Wrong Conclusions 79 

IX. 

Conservation of Faith . 89 

X. 

Conservation of Faith in God 95 

XI. 
Conservation of the Faith which Believes 

in the Final Overthrow of Evil ... 107 

XIL 
Conservation of Christian Love • 121 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 



PREFACE. 

Conservation has come to be a large move- 
ment, and it now has a place in the thought of 
educators, ministers, statesmen, presidents, and 
philanthropists. Conservation calls forth the best 
that is in statesmanship for our present and future 
public benefit and good. The scientist of our day 
sees the larger application of this growing subject, 
and he is beginning to direct his thought accord- 
ingly. Leaders of large industrial and railroad 
enterprises have become awakened to the signifi- 
cance of Conservation, and they are bringing their 
great influence to bear in promotion of the move- 
ment. Economists have changed their thought 
and modes of expression on account of this new 
influence of Conservation. Editorial expression 
has passed through a marked change because of 
this new modern movement, and this may be dis- 
covered especially in the modern high-class maga- 
zine. Even now the subject of Conservation has 
passed beyond the political field, and it has gone 
up into much higher applications. In truth, Con- 
servation is Patriotism at its best, and even more 
than this. In the end, Conservation will have 
its highest and largest application in the region of 



6 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

spiritual verity. The line of thought introduced 
in the following pages is in harmony with the first 
principles of Higher Conservation. 

It has been the custom of those who would fix 
thought in the mind, in all ages, to take some ma- 
terial object and use it as a base upon which to 
build a thought, and this is the method followed 
in this work. The first principles of Conservation 
have been brought into view, and then the thought 
naturally ascends to the realm of Revealed Truth. 
No attempt has been made, however, to follow an- 
alogy in detail. Only a few essential analogies 
have been traced, and all detail has been left out. 
If any great truth is found in these pages in anew 
setting, and seen from a new viewpoint, and there- 
by made more vital, then the purpose of the writer 
will have been accomplished. So, with Words- 
worth, I say, 

"Trusting that not incongruously I blend 
Low things with lofty." 

MARCUS L. GRAY. 
Chillicothe, Me., June 1st, 1911. 



8 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming: of the Lord. Behold, 
the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long: 
patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also pa- 
tient."— James. 

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch 
in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away; and every branch that beareth 
fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring: forth more fruit."— St. John. 

"What less can we do than be like fruitful fields, which produce be- 
yond comparison more than was thrown into them?"— Cicero. 

"What time the dewdrop on the gentle grass 
Is sweetest to the flock." — Virgil. 

"Thou that seest Universal 

Nature moved by Universal Mind."— Tennyson. 

"What makes the valleys laug"h and sing*, what star 
Should speed the plough and marry vine to elm, 
The care of kine and how to rear a flock, 
What skill shall keep the parsimonions bee, 
Hence is my song*, Maecenas."— Virgil. 

In this garden man was to receive every possible aid and inducement 
to development and poductiveness; nothing was wanting which could win 
men to holiness, nothing which could enlarge, purify, fertilize human na- 
ture."— Marcus Dods. 

"Now learn the genius of each soil, its strength, 

Its colour and its proper fertile power. 

What lands are stubborn and what hills unkind, 

Posse 3.4ed by gra/el, thorn and lean white clay." — Virgil. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 



SECTION I. 



CONSERVATION OF OUR NATURAL RESOURCES. 

Conservation is defined as the act of preserv- 
ing, guarding, protecting, and keeping a thing in a 
safe and entire state. Conservation thus defined 
has a wide application when we think of the fact 
that the American people alone have come into 
possession of nearly four million square miles of 
abundantly rich acres of land. Other nations, 
such as England, France, Germany, Italy and Rus- 
sia, have been enriched by lands of abundant fer- 
tility, and these lands, even after centuries of cul- 
tivation, remain as national assets. It was worth 
while for the Pilgrim Fathers to come from the 
older countries of Europe to the virgin soil of the 
New World. The Jamestown Colony found liberty 
and a vast expanse of rich Southland. Their in- 
heritance was larger and better than that which 
was found by the early Egyptians along the banks 
of the Nile. The Chaldeans inhabiting the Eu- 
phrates Valley did not possess treasures of fertil- 
ity so great as the pioneers who settled along the 
banks of the Mississippi and Missouri. Sunny 
Italy, blessed with golden valleys and vine-clad 
hills, may not be compared, as to resources, with 
the sunny South, white as snow with fields of cot- 



10 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

ton. The valley of the Ohio is as rich, and may 
become as beautiful, as the valley of the Seine in 
France. The river Rhine is not more glorious than 
the Hudson, dropping like molten silver from the 
mountains of the North. The plains of Russia bear 
harvests no more golden than may be found on 
the plains of Manitoba. The cedar forests of far- 
famed Lebanon did not excel the mountain forests 
of California. The uplifted Alps, ever famous and 
justly so, have never opened such , treasures as 
have been found in the Rocky Mountains of Colo- 
rado. Pharaoh's treasure-houses in Egypt would 
not hold a tithe of the grains grown between the 
Atlantic and the Pacific. Classic Mt. Ida, of My- 
sia, where Paris pronounced judgment on the 
beauty of rival goddesses, does not surpass Mt. 
Shasta, overlooking the Pacific. When the Pilgrim 
Fathers knelt first in devout and thankful vesper 
prayers on these shores, and when the setting sun 
shot rays of golden light above the horizon of the 
western sky, those golden rays were a fit emblem 
of the rich inheritance into which they and their 
children had come. Here on this border land they 
slept, the purpose of Aeneas within their breasts, 

"Resolved, when daybreak brought the gladsome light, 
To search the coast, and back sure tidings bear." 

What have we done with all these vast natural 
resources of the New World? We have used them 
and luxuriated in them, and we have wasted them, 
unfortunately, and sometimes in a way quite prod- 
igal. What, for instance, fhas become of our Amer- 
ican forests? What has become of our groves of 
forest trees, the first temples where our fathers 
worshiped? The love of trees is one 'of the noble 
sentiments of mankind, and Oliver Wendell Holmes 
gives expression to this sentiment when he says: 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 11 

1 'There is a mother idea in each particular kind of 
tree, which, if well marked, is probably embodied 
in the poetry of every language. Take the oak, 
for instance, and we find it always standing as a 
type of strength and endurance. I wonder if you 
ever thought of the single mark of supremacy 
which distinguishes this tree from all other forest 
trees. All the rest of them shirk the work of re- 
sisting gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses 
the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their 
whole weight may tell, and then stretches them 
out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be 
mighty enough to be worth resisting.' ' But no 
matter how nobly the oak, the poplar, and the elm 
may stand, the work of destruction goes on. This 
work of destruction has not only destroyed the 
beauty of the forest, but its utility is likewise gone. 
Let us have Dr. Holmes tell the story of waste: 
' It won't do to be exclusive in trees: There is 
hardly one of them which has not peculiar beauties 
in some fitting place for it. I remember a tall 
poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a 
vast pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit 
of a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the country 
round. A native of that region saw fit to build his 
house very near it, and having a fancy that it 
might blow down some time or other and extermi- 
nate himself and any incidental relatives who 
might be 'stopping' or 'tarrying' with him— also 
laboring under the delusion that human life is un- 
der all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable 
existence— had the poplar cut down." 

It is estimated that out of the vast forests of 
the United States the timber that now remains 
standing would cut only fourteen hundred billion 
feet of lumber. We use one hundred billion feet 



12 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

every year, and the annual growth of timber is 
only thirty billion feet. At the present rate of 
consumption the passing of one generation may 
mark the passing away of our great American for- 
ests. Gifford Pinchot sums up the situation in 
these words: ' It is certain that the rate of con- 
sumption of timber will increase enormously in the 
future, as it has in the past, so long as supplies 
remain to draw upon. Exact knowledge of many 
other factors is needed before closely accurate re- 
sults can be obtained. The figures cited are, how- 
ever, sufficiently reliable to make it certain that 
the United States has already crossed the verge of 
a timber famine so severe that its blighting effects 
will be felt in every household in the land. The 
rise in the price of lumber which marked the open- 
ing of the present century is the beginning of a 
vastly greater and more rapid rise which is to 
come. We must necessarily begin to suffer from 
the scarcity of timber long before our supplies are 
completely exhusted." 

Many of our most thoughtful men in all lines 
of life have noticed the waste of soil which is de- 
preciating farm values all over the United States. 
It is an old story about abandoned farms in New 
England, and unless there is a change for the bet- 
ter we will hear more of it. Years ago Virginia 
was called upon to look on many of her farms 
largely washed away. What happened to New 
England and Virginia years ago may be seen today 
on farms in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and 
Kansas. It gives one only a faint idea of what is 
going on in the way of soil washed away from the 
face of the earth to say that the Mississippi River 
alone carries annually into the Gulf of Mexico 
twice the amount of dirt excavated by our govern- 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 13 

ment at Panama. To impoverish our farms thus 
means that we are sure to impoverish our families 
and bring on harder times. 

When we think of our coal supply the figures 
are not any more reassuring. Fifty years more 
will exhaust our supply of anthracite coal, if mat- 
ters go on as they have been doing. Two hundred 
years more will take out the last ton of bituminous 
coal. Many mines even now are already exhaust- 
ed. 

Oil wells are likewise giving out, and we are 
depending on new oil fields for our daily supply. 
Even now we are drifting from West Virginia and 
Ohio to Oklahoma and Texas. Yet we waste oil 
by the thousands of barrels and burn gas day and 
night as if it would last forever. 



14 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"In St. John too we see that growth of spiritual enlightenment which 
made his life an unbroken education. In his latest writings we find a deeper 
insight into the truth than it would have been possible for him to attain be- 
fore God had 'shown him all things in the slow history of their ripening'."— 
Canon Farrar. 

"God gives us the spirit of discernment, the power of seeing spiritual 
realities and relations. It is not a natural endowment common to the whole 
human species: it is a distinct and special gift of God."— Dr. Joseph Park- 



"Though the mariner sees not the pole-star, yet the needle of the com- 
pass which points to it, tells him which way he sails: thus the heart which 
is touched with the loadstone of divine love."— Leighton. 

"There are many serious and sincere Christians who have not attained 
to a fullness of knowledge and insight, but are well and judiciously employed 
in preparing for it."— Coleridge. 

"Stood I, O Nature! man alone in thee, 

Then were it worth one's while a man to be."— Goethe. 

"Scripture reverses the judgment of the world in making mental cul- 
ture wholly incommensurate in importance with spiritual growth."— Canon 
Farrar. 

"Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit 
which is of God: that we might know the things that are given to us of 
God. "-St. Paul. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 15 



SECTION II. 



The Spiritual Resources of the Church as Taught by 

St. John; His Preparation. 

It is a pleasure to think of the natural re- 
sources of the United States and of other coun- 
tries, and it is even a greater pleasure to take an 
account of the inexhaustible resources of the 
Church and of the Kingdom of God. The glorious 
Kingdom of God has spiritual riches and treasures 
peculiar to itself, and St. John explored these 
spiritual riches more thoroughly than any other 
Evangelist. Nature, time, and grace gave St. 
John a ripened experience in spiritual things, and 
he was spared to the Church to become the chief 
expositor of the spiritual life of our Lord. Born in 
Bethsaida of Galilee, the son of Zabdia or Zebedee, 
a fisherman of more than usual wealth, St. John 
spent his early years as a free child of nature; lake, 
shore and forested mountain side for his home. 
Salome, his devoted mother, possibly turned his 
youthful eyes more than once to the snowy heights 
of Mount Lebanon, God's natural messenger of 
purity and holiness. In his father's calling of 
fisherman he found healthful exercise and bodily 
strength, which served him well for nearly a hun- 



16 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

dred years. The growing business of his father 
doubtless took St. John to Jerusalem when he was 
a young man about twenty-five years of age, and 
it was there that he heard of the baptism at Jor- 
dan, and it was at Jordan where he first met Je- 
sus, the fountain of all spiritual life. Here on the 
banks of Jordan the young Galilean fisherman 
heand a sermon from John the Baptist, which 
changed the current of his whole life, and that ser- 
mon was a sentence, "Behold the Lamb of God!" 
St. John made a short visit with the Master, and 
thus began the lasting friendship between Jesus 
and "that disciple whom Jesus loved." The cul- 
mination of that friendship is described by Canon 
Farrar who says that "St. John was one of those 
pure saints of whom the grace of God takes early 
hold, and in whose life, as in those of Thomas a 
Kempis and Melancthon, 'reason and religion run 
together like warp and woof to weave the web of a 
holy life'." 

And yet St. John's early life was marked by a 
surplus of physical vigor and spirit. His was a 
virile life and a manly nature, He shared the in- 
dependent, manly spirit of the Galileans of his 
early years. These Galileans had entered into the 
revolt of Judas against certain registrations re- 
quired by Quirinus, and they were enemies to the 
Roman dominion and the Herodian satrapy. Zebe- 
dee's son entered into the vigorous spirit of his 
times, and when Jesus came into touch with his 
life He gave John a characteristic name, "Boaner- 
ges," a son of thunder. This trait of his charac- 
ter is evident throughout the Book of Revelation, 
a book born in an age of persecutions. Interwov- 
en with his great strength of character is a thread 
of the most refined spiritual sentiment. He was 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 17 

endowed with a capacity for spiritual discernment, 
and thus he became the Apostle of the Incarnation. 
This spiritual trend of his nature gave him advan- 
tages over some of his brethren. Thus he enjoyed 
the great privilege of being present when our 
Lord was transfigured on the Mount. That night 
he became an eye witness to the divine glory which 
transfigured Him Who was soon to suffer for the sins 
of the whole world. He was also *an ear witness to 
the voice which came from the excellent glory. The 
darkest night in the. life of Jesus was spent in the 
garden of Gethsemane, and John was a witness to 
the mysterious agony of that hour, and fell asleep 
himself only when his own sorrow had overwhelm- 
ed him. St. John was possibly the only Apostle 
who stood near the Cross and witnessed that death 
and saw the shedding of that blood which was to 
make atonement for sin for all time. The appeal of 
the Cross lingered with St. John as with no other 
Apostle, its unspeakable humiliation and suffering. 
Could he ever forget That Hour of all hours in the 
records of time? That hour when the face of God 
was turned away, for a time, from the face of His 
Son? Death, however, did not overcome the force 
of spiritual gravity in the heart of St. John, as we 
see that he is among the first to visit the sepulchre 
after he had heard of the resurrection of Jesus. 
The feeling of depression that comes with the 
presence of death now gave way to the feeling of 
joy that comes with life, life victorious over death. 
St. John then knew for the first time that this 
Risen Life of Jesus meant the risen life of all the 
sons of Adam, and that the spiritual realm should 
forever have dominion over death. This "beloved 
disciple' ' conversed with Jesus a number of times 
before the Ascension, and was so fully persuaded 



18 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

of the truth of these spiritual verities that he could 
say to the end of his life "I know." It was like- 
wise most natural that St. John should be in the 
"upper room' ' with the disciples at the epochal 
moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon that 
devout company of believers. At that moment 
heaven and earth came into touch, and when the 
new Age of the Holy Ghost was ushered in, John 
was fully prepared to enter into fellowship with 
the heavenly world. The wireless message of the 
spirit found the spirit of St. John in tune with the 
Infinite, and the cloven tongue of fire sat upon his 
head. His soul took heavenly wing and he became 
the eagle of the heavenly heights, his eye keenly dis- 
cerning the rays of light coming from the immedi- 
ate presence of the Son of Righteousness. After 
this pentecostal illumination, St. John resided in 
Jerusalem for a season, edifying the Church in 
faith and doctrine, and he took part in the council 
of Jerusalem which decided important matters per- 
taining to the Church among the Gentiles. Ter- 
tullian states that when Domitian waged war 
against the Church of Christ A. D. 95, John was 
banished from Ephesus and carried to Rome, 
where he was immersed in a cauldron of boiling 
oil, and out of which he escaped unhurt. After 
this he was banished to the isle of Patmos, in the 
Aegean Sea, where he experienced the vision of 
the Apocalypse. Domitian having been slain in A. 
D. 96, Nerva, his successor, recalled all exiles, and 
St. John is supposed to have faken up his residence 
again at Ephesus. Polycrates, the Bishop of 
Ephesus, assures us that the most venerable of all 
the Apostles was buried at Ephesus. Thus it is 
seen that one hundred years of time were necessa- 
ry to ripen this son of nature for writing the 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 19 

Fourth Gospel, his three Epistles, and the Apo- 
calypse; all works of the highest spiritual concep- 
tion and elevation. Browning, in poetic lines, 
sums up the story of St. John's life, 

"For life, with all it yields of joy and woe, 
And hope and fear— believe the aged friend — 
Is just our chance of the prize of learning Love." 

St. John's spiritual conceptions having become 
clearly defined and refined, he was prepared to 
give us an inventory of the spiritual resources of 
the Church of God. His first great spiritual equa- 
tion is the equality of the Son with the Father, and 
he carries this Mystery of the Incarnation through 
his entire Gospel. His second abiding resource of 
the Church is the confident Vision of the final over- 
throw of Evil, and the final triumph of Righteous- 
ness. His third great resource of the Church of 
Christ is Love and Love ripening for Heaven* 



20 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"Not only philosophy and the so-called gnosis, but also the Scriptures, 
recognize and avow a divine ideal world to which the actual world stands re- 
lated as the historical development of an eternal conception." —Dr. De- 
litsch. 

"That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we 
have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have 
handled, of the Word of life."— St. John. 

"And in the days of these kings shall the God of Heaven set up a king- 
dom, which shall never be destroyed; nor shall the sovereignty thereof be 
left to another people; but it shall break in pieces and consume all these 
kingdoms, and it shall stand forever."— Daniel. 

"Jesus Himself, as He appears in the Gospels, and for the very reason 
that He is so manifestly above the heads of His reporters there, is, in the jar- 
gon of modern philosophy, an absolute; we cannot explain Him; cannot get 
behind Him and above Him, cannot command Him."— Matthew Arnold. 

"During the sixteen months of my aberration from the Catholic Faith' 
I presumed that the tenets of the divinity of Christ, the Redemption, and 
the like, were irrational, and that what was contradictory to reason could 
not have been revealed by the Supreme Reason. As soon as I discovered that 
these doctrines were not only consistent with reason, but themselves very 
reason, I returned at once to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures* 
and the Faith."— Coleridge. 

"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. Therefore the Jews 
sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the Sabbath 
but said also that God was His Father, making Himself equal with God." — 
St. John. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 21 



SECTION III. 



Conservation of the Doctrine of the Divinity of 
Christ as Taught by St. John. 

In the formation of the Government of the 
United States, Alexander Hamilton maintained 
and conserved the idea of a central national power 
and authority, and this thought he stood for as one 
of the founders of the Republic. Thomas Jeffer- 
son, on the other hand, conserved the movement 
for popular government, and this is the distin- 
guishing achievement of his life. St. John lived 
to a day in the Early Church when he felt it to be 
his supreme duty to conserve the doctrine of the 
divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. As a resident 
of the city of Ephesus he had occasion to notice the 
trend of thought in his day, and in his judgment, 
certain philosophies were threatening the founda- 
tions of Christianity. Thus the Fourth Gospel was 
designed by St. John to settle certain fundamental 
questions touching the Divine Being of Jesus for 
all time. Of the Four Gospels, St. John's is the 
Spiritual Gospel far beyond all the others. There 
is such a thing as the final word, and this Evange- 
list gave utterance to that word when he unfolded 
the mystery of the Godhead in Christ Jesus. The 



22 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

engineers at Panama have taken great pains to 
build the foundation of the Gatun Dam so that it 
will last for ages to come, and in all probability, 
they have succeeded. That St. John expounded 
the foundations of the Christian Religion for all 
time is known to the scholarship of the world. 
Even his Epistles were designed to fortify the di- 
vinity of Christ as he had taught the doctrine in 
his Gospel. The Book of Revelation reveals our 
Divine Lord as supreme over all the Churches, and 
as Ruler over all the kingdoms of the world. As 
the destinies of the nations of Europe were settled 
at Waterloo, so the mere Humanitarian view of 
Christ went down forever under the hand of St. 
John. 

The doctrines of St. John's Gospel did not pass 
unchallenged in his day, and they have been sub- 
jected to the criticism of the more modern Tubing- 
en school of German scholars. Cerinthus and his 
teachings at the end of the first century were prob- 
ably well known to St. John. Cerinthus came 
from Alexandria to Ephesus, and began to teach 
some strange doctrines. He was of the Jewish 
faith and taught that the law of Moses should be 
kept even by Christians. Together with a sect 
known as Ebionites, he believed in the notion of a 
vast chasm between God and the material world. 
He taught that Jesus was a mere man at his birth, 
and that at His baptism, the Holy Ghost gave Him 
a divine character, and that this character remain- 
ed with Him till the crucifixion, and no longer. 
He saw no atonement in the death of Christ, but 
looked to legal obedience for salvation. Cerinthus 
also taught his followers to believe in a millennium 
of gross sensual indulgence. It remained for Her- 
der, in modern times, to advance the theory that 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 23 

St. John's gospel gives an account, not of 
the historical Christ, but of an ideal Christ, 
such as Plato might have suggested- Dr. 
Strauss as late as 1835 in his "Life of Jesus' ' 
contended that the Fourth Gospel was not the 
work of the son of Zebedee. The Tubingen school 
later advanced the position that St. John's Gospel 
represents ' 'a highly-developed stage of an ortho- 
dox gnosis", as Dr. Liddon expresses it. The 
best scholarship of today does not support any 
such groundless views, and they may be dismissed 
from further consideration here. 

Canon Liddon takes the position that St. 
John's Gospel is in the first place an historical sup- 
plement; in the second place, a polemical treatise; 
and finally has a direct, positive, dogmatic pur- 
pose. "He teaches the highest revealed truth con- 
cerning the Person of our Lord. His Gospel's 
substantive and enduring value consists in its dis- 
playing the Everlasting Word or Son of God as his- 
torically incarnate, and as uniting Himself to His 
Church", as the Bampton Lecturer states it. St. 
John himself gives his design in writing the Fourth 
Gospel; "These (things) are written, that ye 
might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of 
God; and that believing ye might have life through 
His name." This is enough to prepare us more 
perfectly for St. John's introduction to his Gospel- 
in which above all other considerations he desires, 
to conserve the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. 

"In the beginning was the Logos or If ord" is; 
his first sentence, and in this declaration he asserts; 
the eternity of Christ, and His office as the Re- 
vealer of God the Father. There is no thought of 
a momentary and temporary Christ here, r as 
taught by Cerinthus and others at Ephesus. 



24 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

Christ was in eternity before the heavens were 
framed. Christ was a Person in eternity before 
any other person had been created* Christ was a 
Being in eternity preceding all other beings. 
Christ was a Thought in eternity before human 
thought had any existence. Christ was a Reason 
in eternity before any other reason took form. 
Even in eternity, before time, the Lord Jesus 
Christ was God revealing God, the Logos or Word, 
the revelation of the Father. The Word was the 
door through which God became known to all mor- 
al intelligences. Jesus was to be the Everlasting 
Organ of God himself revealed and made known. 
This is the mystery of God in Christ Jesus. These 
are the mountain heights to which St John points 
us, and as we gaze upon them, they become en- 
veloped in the white mists of eternity. This 
brings us to the everlasting granite of revealed 
Truth. Here within the solid walls of eternal 
Truth God's children may abide forever, unmolest- 
ed by storm and unshaken by earthquake. 

"And the Logos or Word was with God" This 
is St. John's second statement in his prologue, and 
he had a purpose in the very form of the expres- 
sion. The world and all created things came into 
being from God, but Christ was with God. Christ 
was ever with God, and in truth there is no possi- 
bility that He was only momentarily with God. 
When our Lord himself was almost face to face 
with death, and while engaged in devout prayer to 
the Father, He breathed forth this truth: "And 
now, Father, glorify thou me with thine own 
self with the glory which I had with, thee before 
the world was." Before creation dawned, the 
glory of the Father and the glory of Jesus were in- 
terwoven; the golden glory of the Father and the 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 25 

golden glory of the Son fused; the starry glory of 
the Father and the starry glory of the Son blended 
forever in the eternal heavens. Let Canon Liddon 
have the final word on this part of the subject: 
"The Only-begotten Son is in the bosom of the 
Father just as the Logos is with God, ever con- 
templating, ever, as it were, moving towards Him 
in the ceaseless activities of an ineffable commun- 
ion. The Son is His Father's equal, in that He is 
partaker of His nature; He is His Subordinate, in 
that this Equality is eternally derived. But the 
Father worketh hitherto and the Son works; the 
Father hath life in Himself; and has given to the 
Son to have life in Himself; all men are to honor 
the Son even as they honor the Father.' ' 

"And the Logos was God" Philo was a Jewish 
philosopher of Alexandria and his purpose was to 
state the teachings of the Old Testament in the 
terms of the philosophy of Plato. Philo made use 
of the word logos as expressive of ideal existence, 
but St. John boldly declares that the Logos was 
Christ and that Christ was God. Christ was of 
the essence and substance of God. Christ's es- 
sence and nature was divine. Let the wise men 
teach what they will, one truth abides from eter- 
nity past to eternity to come, Christ is God. Of 
this exalted position taken by St. John, St. Augus- 
tine truly says: "In the four Gospels, or rather 
in the four books of the one Gospel, the Apostle 
St. John, deservedly compared to an eagle, by 
reason of his spiritual understanding, has lifted 
his ennunciation of truth to a far higher and sub- 
limer point than the other three, and by this eleva- 
tion he would fain have our hearts lifted up like- 
wise. For the other three Evangelists walked, so 
to speak, on earth with our Lord as Man. Of His 



26 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

Godhead they said but a few things. But John, 
as if he found it oppressive to walk on earth, has 
opened his treatise as it were with a peal of thun- 
der; he has raised himself not merely above the 
earth, and the whole compass and the air and 
heaven, but even above every angel-host, and 
every order of the invisible powers, and has reach- 
ed even to Him by Whom all things were made." 
"All things were made by Him: and without 
Him was not any thing made that was made.'' 
Cerinthus and many of the teachers of his day had 
taught that God did not concern himself about ma- 
terial things; the Divine one was too ethereal to 
consider anything so gross as matter. St. John 
sets aside this idealism in ascribing the work of 
creating matter directly to Christ. Men are not 
thus dealing with a merely ideal Christ, but with a 
Christ whose creative power touches "every atom 
and force in earth and heaven. The Divine Pres- 
ence of Christ hallows and blesses all created 
things. Fields and seas are his own by creation, 
as well as redemption. Material things are not 
unholy, but they are baptized by the creative pow- 
er and presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. Even 
man's body is not unholy, but a living temple for 
the indwelling of the heavenly Guest, infinitely 
holy and pure. Christ as one of the Persons of 
the Godhead preceded all created things: He 
caused them to come into being; and He is not 
ashamed of them. What God in Christ Jesus has 
created sacred is not to be despised by man, and 
matter divinely created is to minister to God and 
man. So man is God's child in God's world, and 
so God having created the world, man is to con- 
serve and husband its resources. It is no 
wonder that Augustine, in De civitate Dei, 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 27 

quotes Simplicus as having told him that 
he had heard a Platonic philosopher say that 
these first verses of St. John's Gospel were 
worthy to be written in letters of gold. The 
learned Francis Junius, in giving an account of his 
own life, states that in his youth he was given to 
some looseness in his religious ideas, and that he 
was wonderfully recovered by reading these first 
verses by St. John in a Bible which his father had 
designedly placed in his way. He at once saw di- 
vinity in the argument, and authority and majesty 
in the style, and his flesh trembled in the presence 
of God. 

i( In Him was life" The vital forces, physical 
and spiritual, take their rise and [origin in Christ 
Jesus. The Father is the Living God and Christ is 
the Living Son, and in Him we have our life. The 
idols of paganism were lifeless, senseless, and 
motionless, but Christ, the Son of God, is Life it- 
self, and the Fountain of all life. God is self-ex- 
istent life and Christ is self-existent life, and from 
Him our life is derived. All life traced back to its 
origin is in Christ Jesus. That man does not live, 
in the highest sense, whose life has not touched 
the life of the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus Christ 
has an electric charge of spiritual life for every 
man who comes to God in Him. Every man car- 
ries in his soul a spiritual battery, spiritual facul- 
ties, but it is not every man who has come to 
Christ to have this battery charged with the cur- 
rent of everlasting life. It is the privilege of 
every man to have his spirit touch the living spirit 
of Jesus Christ, and himself live forever. This 
new spiritual life is broadened and enriched after 
the order indicated by Dr. Joseph Parker who says: 
4 'We shall have a poor notion of life if we regard 



28 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

it as being a blessing only in proportion as it is a 
succession of sunny scenes. That is not life; it is 
but one aspect of it. No great life is made up of 
all sunshine; we get strong by discipline, we grow 
by strife. The great storm rocks us into rugged 
power, and by this power of endurance we come 
into the grace of gentleness. Great sorrows make 
tender hearts. We are softened and refreshed by 
the dew of tears. When we are weak, then are we 
strong. You can never be great and reliable, full- 
grown men, till your hearts have been crushed 
within you, and God has taught you in the gloomy 
school of a thousand disappointments.' ' But the 
chastened life is akin to the life of Christ who en- 
dured the humiliation of the Cross that millions of 
men might live in Him. To live apart from Christ 
is to miss the best of life, and many men have 
learned this secret. The best life known to the 
world today is the life hid with Christ in God. 

"And the life was the light of men." The Life 
of Christ became the lamp to lighten the darkened 
pathway of men. Men walked in moral darkness, 
not even their consciences discerning between 
right and wrong, good and evil. Christ became 
the inner light to the darkened cloister of con- 
science. He was even more than a flame and a 
lamp, for He became a Sun of Righteousness to all 
the world. Even critics have never been able to 
obscure the Light of the World. Dr. W. Robert- 
son Nicoll refers to George Eliot who, in her last 
novel, Daniel Deronda, "suggests a parallel be- 
tween her hero and the Redeemer approaching 
Israel, and tries to make him an ideal character, 
but, as has been said, he is as feeble and colorless 
a charcater as can be, and was well enough de- 
scribed by Mr. Hutton as a 'moral mist'." Even 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 29 

Rouseau had a much clearer vision of the light in 
Christ Jesus, as we see when he says; "The Gos- 
pel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so 
perfectly inimitable, that the inventor of it would 
be more astonishing than the hero. If the life and 
death of Socrates are those of a sage, the life and 
death of Jesus are those of a God." John Stuart 
Mill bears this further testimony: "Who among 
the desciples of Jesus, or among their proselytes, 
was capable of inventing those sayings ascribed to 
Jesus, or of imagining the life and character re- 
vealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fisher- 
men of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul. It is the 
God Incarnate, more than the God of the Jews 
or of nature, who, being idealized, has taken so 
great and salutary hold on the modern mind." 

' 'But the more positive and larger setting forth 
of the truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Light 
of men is stated by Dr. Joseph Parker: "As the 
sun shines", he says, "for every man, so Jesus 
Christ lives for every man. The lamp in the house 
belongs to the householder: the lamp in the street 
is a local convenience: but the sun pours its morn- 
ing and its noontide into every valley, and into the 
humblest home; that is the true light: the freehold 
of every man, —the private property of none! And 
every man knows that the sun is the true light, — 
feels it to be such, —and without hesitation affirms 
it to be supreme. There is no debate as to wheth- 
er the sun or the moon is the light of the world. 
Imagine a dark night, and an observer who has 
never seen the sun: a star suddenly shows itself, 
and the observer hails it with delight; presently 
the moon shines with all her gentle strength, and 
the observer says— 'This is the fulfilment of prom- 
ise; can ought be lovelier, can the sky possibly be 



30 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

brighter V In due course the sun comes up, every 
cloud is filled with light; every mountain is crown- 
ed with a strange glory; every leaf in the forest is 
silvered; the sea becomes a burnished glass, and 
secrecy is chased from the face of the earth: under 
such a vision, the observer knows that this is the 
true light,— the sovereign all-dominating flame. 
It is so in the revelation of Jesus Christ. When 
the eyes of men are opened to see Him in all His 
Grace and wisdom and sympathy, — in all the suf- 
ficiency of His sacrifice, and the comfort of His 
Spirit,— the heart is satisfied, and every rival light 
is lost in the infinite splendor of God and the Son." 



32 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"At one time it seemed to me impossible that any proposition, verbally- 
intelligible as such, could be more violently absurd than that of the doctrine 
of the Incarnation. Now I see that this standpoint is wholly irrational, due 
only to the blindness of reason itself promoted by purely scientific habits of 
thought."— George John Romanes. 

"The Evangelist John seems to know the heart of Jesus Christ. 
John was the spiritual Evangelist; he had keen, spriritual eyes. True, in- 
deed, he saw all the miracles of an outward and public kind that Jesus 
Christ did, but he seemed to make a special note of those spiritual miracles 
which deal more directly with the heart and conscience, the inner life, and 
secret motives of men."— Dr. Joseph Parker. 

"For as the Father hath life in Himself; so hath He given to the Son to 
have life in Himself; and hath given Him authority to execute judgment al- 
so, because He is the Son of man."— St. John. 

"It is a general, if not a universal, rule that those who reject Chris- 
tianity with contempt are those who care not for religion of any kind. 'De- 
part from us' has always been the sentiment of such. On the other hand, 
those in whom the religious sentiment is in tact, but who have rejected 
Christianity on intellectual grounds still almost deify Christ. These are re- 
markable facts."— George John Romanes. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 33 



SECTION IV. 



St. John's Conservation of the Doctrine of the Div- 
inity of Christ as Evidenced by His 

Self-Manifestation. 

Another evidence of the Divinity of Christ is 
found in the remarkable Declaration of Himself. 
This statement is made in a manner as guarded as 
possible so as to tone down any possible intima- 
tion of egotism. The Evangelists have all ascrib- 
ed unselfishness to Jesus in their accounts of His 
life, and we all know that He was always devoted 
to the interests of others. Nevertheless, there is 
a strong Declaration of Himself in many of His 
public utterances. He expounds His Own nature 
and Messiahship to His disciples and to His critics, 
the Scribes and Pharisees. St. John gives us 
passage after passage in proof of this position. 
' 'Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am 
the Light of the World." This declaration is a 
most remarkable assertion of Himself as the Spir- 
itual Light of all men. "I am the Way/ ' and all 
men of all ages who come to God are to walk in 
the way of the Cross. "lam the Truth/ ' and in 
Christ Jesus the most profound philosopher and 
the little child alike shall find that which interests 



34 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

and satisfies. "I am the Life," and all who have 
come to God have confessed that they have never 
truly lived till they found everlasting life in Christ 
Jesus. "I am the Bread of Life," and men live 
today on that Bread, never more to feel want and 
hunger. "I am the Living Bread which came 
down from Heaven," and this reveals Himself as 
coming from God to save and nourish the souls of 
men. "I am the Door of the Sheep. All that 
ever came before me are thieves and robbers." 
This gives Him precedence over all lawgivers, 
prophets, and sages. "I am the Good Shepherd," 
and travel-worn men, thirsty and hungry, coming 
to Him, "go in and out, and find pasture." "I am 
the True Vine," and there is no branch, there is 
no man, that can truly live save as he is vitally 
united to the Lord Jesus Christ. This is surely a 
high claim for Jesus to make* for Himself, but He 
does not hesitate to make such a claim. "If ye 
shall ask anything in My Name, I will do it," and 
this means that all prayer to God is to be offered 
through Him, and that access to the Divine Pres- 
ence is by Him. "I, if I be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto Myself," and thus 
Christ reveals the fact that He is the center of spir- 
itual gravity for all mankind. ' 'The hour is com- 
ing," in the which all that are in the graves shall 
hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have 
done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they 
that have done evil, unto the resurrection of dam- 
nation," and in this connection the Lord Jesus 
Christ tells us plainly that He is Lord over death 
and the dead. He is to be the Power in the resur- 
rection of the dead. What an exalted claim is 
this! ' 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I 
will raise it up," and here we are assured that He 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 35 

is the Power in His Own resurrection. ' 1 am the 
Resurrection' ' is one of the sublimest of all His 
claims. 

"So evermore, by Faith's undying glow, 
We own the Crucified in weal or woe." 

Students of the Evangelists have also been 
deeply impressed with another Self-revelation 
made by the Lord Jesus Christ, and that is that 
He is the Judge of all mankind. This is 
another sublime revelation of Himself made 
to men. This is a great truth and He does 
not disguise it. On a subject of so great im- 
portance the words of Francis W. Newman may be 
quoted: • "I believe that Jesus habitually spoke of 
Himself by the title Son of Man, and that in as- 
suming that title He tacitly alluded to the seventh 
chapter of Daniel, and claimed for Himself the 
Throne of Judgment over all mankind. I know no 
reason to doubt that He actually delivered in sub- 
stance the discourse in the twenty-fifth chapter of 
St. Mattnew." St. John gives us the picture of 
the Day of Judgment in these memorable words: 
"I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on 
it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled 
away; and there was found no place for them. 
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before 
God; and the books were opened: and another 
book was opened, which is the book of life: and 
the dead were judged out of those things which 
were written in the books, according to their 
works. And the sea gave up the dead which were 
in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead 
which were in them: and they were judged every 
man according to their works. And death and hell 
were cast into the lake of fire." In this connec- 
tion the words held by Canon Liddon are [so just 



36 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

and true that they are here given: * 'Christ says 
that He will return to earth as Judge of all man- 
kind. He will sit upon a throne of glory, and will 
be attended by bands of obedient angels. Before 
Him will be gathered all the nations of the world, 
and He will judge them. In other words, He will 
proceed to discharge an office involving such spir- 
itual insight, such discernment of the thoughts 
and intents of the heart of each one of the millions 
at His feet, such awful, unshared supremacy in 
the moral world, that the imagination recoils in 
sheer agony from the task of seriously contempla- 
ting the assumption of these duties by any created 
intelligence. He will draw a sharp trenchant line 
of eternal separation through the dense throng of 
all the assembled races and generations of men. 
He will force every individual human being into 
one of the two distinct classes respectively destin- 
ed for endless happiness and endless woe. He 
will reserve no cases as involving complex moral 
problems beyond His own power of decision- He 
will sanction no intermediate class of awards, to 
meet the neutral morality of souls whom men 
might deem 'too bad for heaven, yet too good for 
hell\" This revelation which Christ makes of 
Himself leads us to conclude that He is none other 
but the Son of God. 

"Be Thou, O Christ, the sinner's stay, 
Though heaven and earth shall pass away!" 

St. John goes even farther in his endeavor to 
conserve the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. 
Jesus made known His Deity to the Jews, and they 
so understood His claim. An exceedingly impor- 
tant conversation took place between Jesus and 
the Jews one winter day in the temple in Solomon's 
porch. St. John gives us all the particulars of 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 37 

this conversation. The things that Jesus had said 
in one of His discourses brought about great divis- 
ions among the Jews. Some of them said, "He 
hath a devil, and is mad." Others among them 
said, "These are not the words of him that hath a 
devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?" 
In order to satisfy themselves more thoroughly 
about this important matter a number of the Jews 
came close to Jesus and asked Him directly, ' 'How 
long dost Thou make us to doubt? If Thou be the 
Christ, tell us plainly." In His reply to this direct 
question, Jesus told them that He had assured 
them that He was the Christ, but that they did not 
believe Him. He then proceeded to show them 
His divine credentials in these words: "The 
Works that I do in my Father's name, they bear 
witness of Me." Then he came to the climax 
when He said: "land my Father are one," and 
He meant to tell them: "I am, in essence and na- 
ture, God as the Father is God." The Jews so 
understood Him, and they became so angered and 
enraged at this blasphemy, as they understood it, 
that they took up stones and were ready to cast 
them at him. Jesus, however, had made His 
meaning clear, and that meaning is that He is 
God. 

St. John was not content to state the doctrine 
of the Deity of Jesus, but he was foremost in his 
search for the evidences of that Divinity. The 
matter at issue was of too much importance to 
leave it unsupported by the highest class of rea- 
sons. The structure of truth upon which he was 
laboring was to last for all time, and as he thought 
of it, the foundation should be of granite, and un- 
shaken with the passing of the centuries. As St. 
John understood it, here in the Divine Nature of 



38 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

the Son of Man is a mine of truth, rich in the ores 
which are to enrich all peoples, and this mine is to 
be conserved as one of the world's greatest treas- 
ures. Let time bury many other things, and let 
many other things be lost, but the Divine Person 
of Jesus must be lifted up for all time. To con- 
serve the Divinity of Christ for all ages is to do 
even a greater work than to conserve all the for- 
ests and all the agricultural interests of the United 
States, and other countries, important as those in- 
terests are. 

St. John and the Jews of his day believed 
alike in God, the Creator of all things. Accord- 
ing to his way of thinking, to admit that God is, 
is to admit that miracles are possible and probable. 
Infinitude cannot be measured in terms of man. 
Many things divine must transcend that which is 
human. Man, who is limited in all his faculties, is 
not the judge of God who is infinite in knowledge 
and power. Sovereign Omnipotence works won- 
ders in the eyes of his limited creatures. So the 
virgin-birth of Christ was a miracle, His life was a 
mystery, His Resurrection was a miracle, and His 
Ascension was a miracle. Jesus was Himself a 
miracle, and He was conscious of this fact. One 
of the most distinguishing things about Christ was 
that He understood Himself. He was conscious of 
the fact that He was a Divine Person, and He 
made known his Godhead to His Disciples, to the 
Jews, and to the Sanhedrin. This Divine Person 
made known His Divine Nature to men by Hi& 
miracles; miracles of power and miracles of mercy. 
As Canon Liddon says: "His miracles differ from 
the miracles of Prophets and Apostles in that, in- 
stead of being answers to prayer, granted by a 
Higher Power, they manifestly flow forth from 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 39 

the majestic Life resident in the Worker. St. 
John accordingly calls them Christ's 'works', 
meaning that they were just such acts as might be 
expected from Him, being such as He was." 
Such miraculous power in the hands of a man 
would have been displayed quite lavishly in all 
probability, but Jesus more frequently veiled His 
Glory and Power, and restrained His Omnipotence, 
thus giving strong evidence that He is God. Even 
an intellectual age cannot ignore the evidential 
value of these miracles. To quote Dr Liddon 
again: "It may be very desirable to defer as far 
as possible to the mental prepossessions of our 
time; but it is not practicable to put asunder two 
things which God has joined together, namely, the 
beauty of Christ's character and the bona fide 
reality of the miracles which He professed to 
work." 

The Lord Jesus Christ took men into the in- 
most shrine of His Being and made known to them 
His Nature and His work. He kept back no sec- 
ret from the knowledge of men, but ^ave them the 
fullest opportunity to fathom His Nature to Its 
deepest depth. Jesus opened His mind, His spirit, 
His Divinity to men in the Sermon on the Mount. 
He called on men to repent of their sins, and set 
forth the highest standard of true holiness. While 
thus standing in the white light of the throne of 
God, He does not repent of any sin, and does not 
feel even the first trace of repentance. He does 
not confess to any sense of weakness and unworth- 
iness. This is not in line with the experience of 
Isaiah who, when he obtained a true Vision of Je- 
hovah, felt the deepest sense of his own sinfulness, 
and unworthiness. Dr. Horace Bushnell truly 
says: "Human piety begins with repentance. It 



40 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

is the effort of a being, implicated in wrong and 
writhing under the stings of guilt, to come unto 
God. The most righteous, or even self-righteous, 
men, blend expressions of sorrow and vows of new 
obedience with their exercises. But Christ in the 
character given Him, never acknowledges sin. It 
is the grand peculiarity of His piety, that He nev- 
er regrets any thing that he has done or been; ex- 
presses, nowhere, a single feeling of compunction, 
or the least sense of unworthiness. On the con- 
trary, He boldly challenges His accusers, in the 
question— Which of you convinceth me of sin? and 
even declares, at the close of His life, in a solemn 
appeal to God, that He has given to men, unsullied, 
the glory divine that was deposited in Him." To 
this testimony may be added that of Dr. W. Rob- 
ertson Nicoll: ' 'How could the Sinless have been 
imagined? Even to paint the ideal, or what we 
are content to call the ideal, as we have seen, tax- 
ed the greatest minds. But to picture the Sinless 
needs something more than truth. It needs in- 
spiration, for Christ's disciples who had been with 
Him in the narrow chamber, in the little boat, who 
had sat with Him partaking of the same rough 
fare, who had walked by His side, would not only 
have detected Him if He had once been selfish or 
hasty or false, but they would have been sure to 
misunderstand Him when He was most wise and 
pure and true. But they had no doubt that His 
glory was the glory of the Only Begotten, and 
they succeeded in giving us the figure of the Sin- 
less. The pencil does not swerve; and yet how in- 
evitable it was that it should swerve had another 
hand not held it! One false note would have de- 
stroyed all, but that false note never comes. 
Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount and he 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 41 

lived it." There is Divinity in Jesus for here is 

"A deep beneath the deep, 
And a height above the height." 

Another phase of the character of Christ i s< 
found in the unusual authority with which He 
taught the doctrines of eternal truth. St. John's 
testimony is: "Never man spake like this man." 
Those who heard the Sermon on the Mount observ- 
ed that Jesus "taught as One having authority, 
and not as the Scribes." The Scribes took up 
truth piece by piece, and part by part, qualifying 
a little here and shading off a little there, and con- 
cluding with a probably and a perhaps. Jesus is 
no such Teacher. He unfolds truth most profound 
with all the authority of the final word. He re- 
vises the Sinaitic Revelation with the authority of 
God, and leaves no doubt in the mind of His hear- 
ers He interprets the Law of Moses as One 
Greater than Moses. His "I say" comes with the 
authority of Eternity. Dr. Theodore Parker adds 
this word: "He unites in Himself the sublimest 
precepts and the divinest practices, thus more 
than realizing the dream of prophets and sages; 
rises free from all prejudice of His age, nation, or 
sect; gives free range to the Spirit of God, in His 
breast; sets aside the Law, sacred and true— hon- 
ored as it was, its form, its sacrifice, its temple, its 
priests, puts away the doctors of the law, subtle, 
irrefragable, and pours out a doctrine beautiful as 
the light, sublime as Heaven, and true as God." 
The Christ of final authority and truth is the Son 
of God, divine in nature and in speech. 

St. John records the fact that Jesus revealed 
Himself to Nathanael, who confessed Him in these 
words: "Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God." St. 
Peter confesses the revelation of Christ to himself 



42 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

at Caesarea Philippi when questioned as to his 
opinion of Jesus. The Apostle Peter bore this pos- 
itive testimony: "Thou are the Christ, the Son of 
the living God." Jesus made known his Godhead 
to Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, when He said 
to Nicodemus: "He that believeth on him is not 
condemned: but he that believeth not is condemn- 
ed already, because he hath not believed in the 
name of the only begotten Son of God." A very 
important conversation took place between St. 
Philip and Jesus in the supper-room just before our 
Lord's Passion, and this conversation has a direct 
bearing on the Divinity of Christ. Jesus had been 
telling His Apostles, plainly, of the death which 
He should shortly accomplish at Jerusalem. In 
view of His death He exhorted them that they 
should not let their hearts be troubled. He com- 
forted them by telling them, "I go to prepare a 
place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for 
you, I will come again and receive you unto my- 
self; that where I am, there ye may be also. And 
whither I go ye know." It was then that St. 
Thomas inquired, "Lord, we know not whither 
Thou goest; and how can we know the way?" St. 
Philip then felt that if he could only have God 
made known to him he would be satisfied, and so 
he said to Jesus, ' 'Lord, shew us the Father, and 
it sufficeth us. " To Philip the answer of Jesus 
took an unexpected form, for He said in reply, 
"Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast 
thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen 
Me hath seen the Father; and how say est thou 
then, Shew us the Father?" Jesus then proceeded 
to explain to Philip in the plainest possible lan- 
guage the relation between God and Himself. 
^Believest thou not," said He, "that I am in the 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 43 

Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I 
speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the 
Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works. 
Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Fath- 
er in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' 
sake. ,, In this case Jesus made use of His Words 
and His Works to convince St. Philip that He is 
very God, and the world today recognizes the in- 
estimable worth of these credentials. "He that 
hath seen Me," says Dr. Joseph Parker, "healing 
the sick and feeding the hungry hath seen the 
Father doing these things; the invisible care of 
God has been exercised from the beginning, but 
now is made manifest, and ye see it in this action 
of mine,— what you now see is but a revelation of 
that which God in secret has never ceased to do! 
He that hath seen Me teaching the ignorant and 
offering the weary rest, hath seen the Father do- 
ing these very things; from His habitation in eter- 
nity He has been doing even so ever since He 
made man to possess the earth; this, therefore, is 
no new act; no new love, no changed affection, it 
is the invisible revealed to your eyes! He that 
hath seen Me seeking and saving the lost, receiv- 
ing sinners and forgiving sins, hath seen the 
Father so doing; and he that hath seen Me sorrow- 
ful unto death, surrendering My own will, taking 
upon Me the form of a servant and becoming obedi- 
ent unto death, even the death of the Cross, hath 
seen what the Father has been and has done 
through all time; He has always been pitiful and 
forgiving, always sorrowful and self-sacrificing, al- 
ways on the Cross!" The conclusion to be drawn 
is that Jesus clearly made known His Godhead to 
His Apostles, and they so understood Him. 

It is strange that any man should discover to 



44 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

the world that he was conscious of existence be- 
fore he became man, and yet this is strikingly true 
as we make the discovery in the life of Christ. 
St. John is careful to give all the particulars of that 
characteristic self -revelation of Jesus, and it comes 
about as follows. In speaking to the Jews, Jesus 
made this remark: "If a man keep My saying, 
he shall never see death/ ' To the mind of the 
Jew, this involved the case of Abraham, and so the 
Jews said- "Abraham is dead, and the prophets; 
and Thou sayest, If a man keep My saying he 
shall never taste of death. Art Thou greater than 
our father Abraham, which is dead? and the proph- 
ets are dead: whom makest thou thyself ?" Then 
Jesus made this remarkable statement to them: 
"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day: 
and he saw it, and was glad." The Jews could 
not understand this and so they said, "Thou art 
not yet fifty years old, and hast Thou seen Abra- 
ham?" Jesus took advantage of this direct ques- 
tion to reveal his Pre-existence, and in answer 
made this most remarkable declaration: "Before 
Abraham was, I am!" This could have but one 
meaning to those who heard Him, and that was 
that He claimed to be more than man, and even 
claimed to be God. They felt that such blasphemy 
was sufficient cause for stoning Him. Jesus had 
simply revealed a great truth concerning Himself. 
St. John reaches the climax of Christ's witness 
concerning Himself when he narrates the story of 
Christ's appearance before the Sanhedrin, the offi- 
cial Jewish senate which was to pronounce its offi- 
cial and final judgment upon Jesus. It is evident 
to every impartial reader of the record that the 
Sanhedrin condemned Jesus to death for one rea- 
son, and for one reason only, and that was that He 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 45 

claimed to be God. When Jesus stood before Pi- 
late the Jewish Court brought in this sentence: 
' 'We have a law, and by our law He ought to die, 
because He made Himself the Son of God." This 
makes quite clear the ground of the charge held 
by the Sanhedrin against Jesus, and that was that 
His claim of Divinity made Him worthy of death 
under the law of Moses. To the mind of the San- 
hedrin, for this man to claim to be God, made Him 
a criminal deserving of but one punishment, and 
that was death. The Sanhedrin had Jesus nailed 
to the Cross because He claimed equality with God, 
and Jesus confessed His Divinity against His sen- 
tence of death and execution on the Cross. This 
is strong testimony, testimony that Death itself 
could not shatter, and St. John uses it as the Cli- 
max of His Record of the inner, Divine Life of 
the Eternal Son of God. 

It will never cease to be intellectually wonder- 
ful that the God-Man, Christ Jesus, has walked 
among men revealing the infinite compassion of 
God the Father, and returning from the Mount of 
Olives to the Father, and equal with the Father in 
all things. Channing brought a well trained in- 
tellect to the study of the Christ and this is his 
conclusion: "When I trace the unaffected majesty 
which runs through the life of Jesus, and see Him 
never falling below His sublime claims amidst pov- 
erty, and scorn, and in His last agony, I have 
feeling of the reality of His character which I can- 
not express. I feel that the Jewish carpenter could 
no more have conceived and sustained this charac- 
ter under motives of imposture, than an infant's 
arm could repeat the deeds of Hercules, or his un- 
awakened intellect comprehend and rival the 
matchless works of genius.' ' 



46 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

i( Ghristus, si non Deus> non bonus.' 3 Christ 
if He is not God, is not good. If men admit that 
Christ is good, they must accept the only alterna- 
tive, and that is that He is God. His goodness 
and His Divinity are inseparable. 



48 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"Honor waits, o'er all the Earth, 
Through endless generations, 
The art that calls her harvests forth, 
And feeds the expectant nations." 

—William Cullen Bryant. 

"Earth never rests: either with fruit she flows, 
Or with young lambs, or with the wheaten sheaf 
Beloved of Ceres: increase loads the drills 
And barns are overcome."— Virgil. 

"Only to a man wholly destitute of spiritual perception can it be that 
Christianity should fail to appear the greatest exhibition of the beautiful* 
the sublime, and of all else that appeals to our spiritual nature, which has 
been known upon our earth."— George John Romanes. 

"And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, 
that he may abide with you forever: even the Spirit of truth; whom the 
world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him; but 
ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you."— St. John. 

"If any reflecting mind be surprised that the aids of the Divine Spirit 
should be deeper than our consciousness can reach, it must arise from the 
not having attended sufficiently to the nature and necessary limits of human 
consciousness. ' ' — Coleridge. 

"The ministry of the Spirit is best seen in the ministry of holy men 
and women whom he hath created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works, 
in the multiplication of himself through believers filled with the Holy Spir* 
it."— Bishop Hendrix. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 49 



SECTION V. 



CONSERVATION OF SPIRITUAL FERTILITY. 

The land of the United States and other coun- 
tries is the foundation of our fortunes and success 
as a nation. We are not a nation of shop-keepers 
as Napoleon said of the English people, but we are 
a nation of producers. Our farms yield annually a 
large amount of our national wealth, and it is a real 
wealth, and not a wealth of fictitious creation. The 
soil of the United States has assured our prosperity 
for hundreds of years to come, and our lands are of 
so much importance to us that it is worth while to 
study something of their formation and composi- 
tion. "The soil," says President Van Hise, "has 
been manufaclured by the processes of nature; but 
its rate of making is so slow that its production has 
required thousands of years, in most cases many 
thousands of years. Its manufacture is due to the 
complex operation of various forces working 
through a number of agents. The chief forces are 
heat, light and gravity; the chief agents are air, wa- 
ter, ice, and organisms, both plant and animal, mi- 
nute and large. These forces and agents co-operat- 
ing together in their work upon the rocks produce 
the soil. The heat and light from the sun are dom- 
inant sources from which the agents derive the en- 



50 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

ergy for their work. The air tends to oxidize the 
mineral particles: the water hydrates them; the bac- 
teria, the earth-worm, and many other animals, and 
plants, all assist in the disintegration and decom- 
position of the rocks/ ' It is estimated that it re- 
quires five hundred years for these processes of na- 
ture to form as much as an inch of soil. So when 
the forces of nature have done their work the soil 
consists of finely pulverized rock mixed with humus; 
the first, inorganic, disintegrated, and decomposed 
minerals: and the humus, decomposed organic mat- 
ter. 

It is well known to practical men that the fer- 
tility of the soil depends largely upon its depth, its 
origin, and its physical condition. The depth of 
soil varies from one to two and three inches on very 
thin land to two and three feet on good land. Rivers 
have much to do in carrying soil from one region of 
country, impoverishing the hill lands, and transfer- 
ring this soil to some bottom level, thus piling the 
soil up till it reaches a thickness of ten and twenty 
feet or more. The winds serve the finer sands in 
the same way and many deep soils have been form- 
ed by the blowing winds. The nature of the rock 
pulverized by heat and cold gives character to the 
soil. Sandstones ground into soil by the forces of 
nature make poor soil. Any soil having granite for 
its origin is poor. Soils formed from limestone are 
rich and strong and wonderfully well adapted to 
corn. The freezing weather of winter is designed 
to separate the fine particles of soil down to a depth 
of eight or twelve inches so as to admit the free 
passage of air and water. This gives us a friable 
pulverized, fertile, productive soil. 

In the United States and her colonial posses- 
sions we have two billion, four hundred million 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 51 

acres of land. The layer of soil that covers these 
billions of acres, manufactured as it has been 
through millions of years, is one of our greatest re- 
sources as a nation. These lands are classified as 
plains, plateaus, and mountains. For farming pur- 
poses the plains are the best; the plateaus better 
adapted to grazing possibly; and the mountains for 
ores of the richest kind. It is well to remember 
that the earth's surface is largely made up of rock, 
and that the prairie plains hold the most choice of 
our farming lands, such as Illinois, Iowa, and Mis- 
souri, for instance. It is also well to bear in mind 
the fact that out of the vast inheritance into which 
the American people have come it is estimated that 
not one half of our area is suitable to agriculture as 
we find these lands naturally situated. In some 
places the surface is stone; mountains are too &>j1 
and steep for farming; many of the plateaus are too 
dry; some lands are rendered infertile by alkali; 
and some are swamp lands. One of our present 
duties is to cultivate dry farming where there is 
lack of sufficient rain fall. Another needed means 
of reclamation is irrigation, and this is being done 
more and more. Draining swamp lands is also ad- 
ding largely to our fertile acres- 

The earth is the mother of man and also his 
teacher. The ground speaks in the wisdom of 
God to man who is dependent upon its processes 
and laws. "The ground," says Dr. Joseph Park- 
er, "is our first lesson-book. We must follow the 
law of the ground. I must get you away, as far as 
I can, from manufactures, and science, and poli- 
tics, and fix your attention upon the great law of 
the land. The land is the true wealth of the na- 
tion. Manufactures are a flash in the pan— they 
succeed, they fail, they change, they die; they go 



52 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

abroad, they are unsteady, vagrant, almost unreck- 
onable— rising or falling now and then— but the 
stability, the wealth, the greatness of the country 
is the land. Where Agriculture is bad, manufac- 
tures cannot advance; where farming is poor, the 
jeweler cannot live." 

St. John, in conserving the doctrine of the Di- 
vinity of Christ, also made a strong plea for the 
Conservation of Spirituality in the world. God 
the Father and God the Son, co-equal in Divine 
essence and power, formed the ground from 
whence all true spiritual life takes its rise. The 
Father and the Son have sent forth the Holy Spirit 
who is the true source of all spiritual life and fruit- 
fulness. It took thousands of years to prepare the 
ground for our present abundant harvests, and it 
required all the ages of ancient history to make 
full preparation for the fulness of the Holy Ghost. 
The hard, rough rocks of the ages have been 
ground down that the fertile life of the Holy Spirit 
might take root in the hearts of men, and that 
fruits unto righteousness might appear. The po- 
sition taken by St. John is radical, and it startles 
the world even to this day. His word is not Re- 
formation, but a New Creation. His word is not 
Ethical, but Spiritual. His word is not Culture, 
but the New Birth. His word is not Evolution, 
but Revolution. His word is not Environment, but 
Love shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost 
given unto us. His word is not Agnosticism, but 
the Faith that stands on the foundation of 
Knowledge. His word is not Education, but Sal- 
vation. This ground of the Fatherhood of God 
and the Divinity of His Son is rich enough and vi- 
tal enough and broad enough to grow the great 
trees of paradise here on earth. In the Godhead 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 53 

of the Father and the Son is a fertile soil as deep 
as eternity where 3, vital, virile, spiritual Religion 
may grow in strength and beauty under the warm- 
ing rays of light shed by the Holy Spirit. Poor 
crops come out of a soil of granite origin, no mat- 
ter how thoroughly the ages may have ground 
these granitic rocks, and Agnosticism, even though 
it may have the polish of a mirror, remains cold 
and lifeless, deeply imbedded in the earth, while 
the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley 
bloom not far away. Soils sometimes form a 
crust at the top so that the grain of corn growing 
up from beneath can not break through into the 
light, and so the Judaism of the Scribes and Phar- 
isees, their ethical teachings, and their splendid 
ritual, had formed a crust over the germinating, 
growing, living, spiritual Kingdom of God. St. 
John discovered what was binding the Kingdom of 
Life, and he wrote out the record of relief as he 
caught the words from the lips of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. The sandstone soils are not only poor, but 
they can not be held in one place. The winds of 
the Desert drift them like snow, and the sands of 
the sea shore are washed away into the depths of 
the sea. Skepticism and infidelity are like a shift- 
ing Sahara, rolling clouds of dust, frightful to 
sight, but subsiding into the Desert that is dead; 
the blossoms of grace nowhere to be seen. Evo- 
lution coupled with Atheism took root somewhat 
in these sands and even the world's best thinkers 
and philosophers finally saw that Atheistic Evolu- 
tion could not stand. Evolution and Spencer's 
unknowable God back of it had its day, and the 
undercurrent of the best thought drew this un- 
scientific fad back into the deep. Theistic Evolu- 
tion, within proper circumscribed limits; an Infi- 



64 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

nite Creator unfolding nature in accordance with a 
certain law which may be called Evolution; this is 
a plant of truth which is more apt to grow in a 
better soil. Reformation, Culture and Education 
are good plants when their roots strike down into 
a limestone soil ranging from one to twenty feet 
deep, into the spiritual Religion which finds its 
roots in God, in God's Son, and in God's Spirit. 

St. John's note is clear and rings out through 
the ages; hear it. "God is a Spirit, and they that 
worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in 
truth." "Except a man be born again, he can not 
seethe kingdom of God." And then in another 
form: "Except a man be born of water and of the 
Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God." 
It is St. John who records the words of Christ to 
Nicodemus: "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye 
must be born again. " It is St. John who speaks of 
the Paraclete. An attorney stands by the side of 
the man for whom he is pleading in court, and the 
Holy Spirit is called the Paraclete because He 
stands by the side of God the Father and God the 
Son and by the side of the sinner, and calls to God 
in behalf of the sinner. So St. John makes this 
additional record: "When the Comforter is come, 
whom I will send unto you from the Father, even 
the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the 
Father, He shall testify of Me." 

"The ministry of the Spirit," says Bishop Hen- 
drix, "is best seen in the ministry of holy men and 
women whom he hath created anew in Christ Jesus 
unto good works, in the multiplication of himself 
through believers filled with the Holy Spirit. 'God 
manifests himself through his Son, but gives his 
life through his Spirit. ' It is the life-giving Spirit, 
imparting repentance, faith, hope, love, courage, 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 55 

who is the great Administrator of the affairs of the 
kingdom. Would you realize his work? 'Think 
away all the nineteen centuries and all Christendom 
and stand face to face with eleven men and their 
Lord promising to guide them into all truth. ' What- 
ever increase Christ's kingdom has had since the 
beginning has been through the power of the Holy 
Spirit, and whatever success it shall have in the 
future must be through the same divine agency and 
his power of reaching, renewing, inspiring, and 
commanding men. What personality has ever 
swayed men as has the Holy Spirit? He fills with 
new recruits the ranks which death has thinned; 
he moves men mightily with the memory of their 
Lord until the love of Christ constrains them; he 
gives them assurance of sonship and heirship of 
God and kinship with men, until he gathers togeth- 
er the mighty army of the witnesses of the ressur- 
rection of Christ, and with himself as a co-witness 
he leads them forth, conquering and to conquor. 
Napoleon's presence on the battlefield was always 
counted as equivalent to forty thousand men; but 
the presence and leadership of the Holy Spirit can 
be reckoned only in terms of divine energy, and not 
of human numbers. One with the Holy Spirit al- 
ways makes a majority, as when Athanasius stood, 
against the world!" 



£6 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"I know whom I have chosen; but that the Scripture may be fulfilled. 
He that eateth bread with Me has lifted up his heel against Me. Now I tell 
you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am 
He."— St. John. 

"In my intercourse with men of various ranks and ages, I have found 
the far larger number of serious and inquiring persons little, if at all, dis- 
quieted by doubts respecting articles of faith simply above comprehension. 
It is only where the belief required of them jars with their moral feelings; 
where a doctrine, in the sense in which they have been taught to receive it, 
appears to contradict their clear notions of right and wrong, or to be at 
variance with the divine attributes of goodness and justice, that these men 
are surprised, perplexed, and alas! not seldom offended and alienated." — 
Coleridge. 

"Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, 
hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath the Father 
and the Son. If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, re- 
ceive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: for he that bid- 
vdeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds."— St. John. 

"And that unless above himself he can 

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man."— Wordsworth. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 5T 



SECTION VI. 



SPIRITUAL EROSION. 

Farm values are sometimes destroyed by the 
waters washing away the soil, and this we call 
erosion. In many instances farms are badly dam- 
aged by erosion even where they are not destroyed. 
It is estimated that the mean annual rainfall in the 
United States stands at thirty inches of water. 
This rainfall in the United States alone in one 
year would make ten Mississippi Rivers as estimat- 
ed by McGee. About one-half of our rainfall is 
evaporated into the air and this is called the fly-off. 
One sixth of our waterfall is taken up by plants or 
goes into the ground to flow as under-ground wa- 
ter, and this is called the cut-oif . The water re- 
maining, one-third, runs into the rivers and on to 
the sea, and this is known as the run-off. "By 
mechanical erosion," says President Van Hise, 
"is meant the carrying away of the soil. This for 
the most part is done by running water, but lo- 
cally may be done by the wind and in some locali- 
ties by water and wind together. The material 
carried away is transported to the streams and 
thence toward or to the sea." Interesting esti- 
mates have been made of the rate of erosion in the 
United States and the estimate given by Dole and 
Stabler is that on an average one inch of our soil 



58 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

is lost by erosion in seven hundred and sixty 
years. This means that our rains carry away 
every year six hundred and ten million cubic yards 
of our best soil. Our soi]s are not manufactured 
rapidly and erosion means ultimate impoverish- 
ment of our lands. Erosion begins in a small way, 
first a rill, then a rivulet, and finally a stream of 
water cutting its way into a ditch down through 
the field. These ditches become large and numer- 
ous, and presently the farm is ruined, and in some 
extreme cases is abandoned. According to Gil- 
bert one great storm during the year will cause 
more erosion than all the other rains of the sea- 
son. The worst storm in ten years will bring about 
greater wash than all the other rains for the entire 
ten years. Gilbert further states that the worst 
storm of a century will do more damage to our 
fields than all the other rains of the century. 

Certain conditions are quite favorable to 
erosion, and they should always be kept in mind. 
A deep slope is most favorable for washing the 
soil away. When the water rushes down a steep 
hillside it gathers great force, and its work of de- 
struction is soon done. If rock underlies the soil 
so that only a small amount of water can be taken 
into the ground, the erosion is all the more rapid 
and destructive. A deep porous sub-soil absorbs a 
large amount of water, and in this case erosion is 
not so bad. It should never be forgotten that 
erosion does some of its worst work under neglect. 
'To neglect a farm that is being impoverished by 
erosion is the direct road to bankruptcy for that 
farmer. In a few years the streams near by will 
have his farm or at least the best of it. This mat- 
ter of erosion is serious business for the farmers 
of the United States and elsewhere. Look at these 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 69 

figures given by Woodruff. Four million acres of 
our lands have already become so eroded that they 
are worthless. This would give one hundred 
thousand farmers forty acres of land apiece. 

Deep tillage is one of the remedies for erosion. 
A field that is plowed deep takes down into itself 
so much of the waterfall that but little is left to 
run off. What is called contour plowing is another 
help against erosion. By thus plowing the furrow 
runs more nearly on a level around the hill. This 
helps to hold the soil from washing. Where the 
land is quite steep, terraces help to prevent de- 
structive erosion. Many steep hillsides have been 
cultivated in grapes and berries by this means, 
and ground that was worthless has become valu- 
able. 

The spiritual life is likewise subject to certain 
erosions which subtract from our spiritual sub- 
stance as the years go by, if we are not constantly 
on our guard. "Spiritual cultivation/' says Dr. 
Parker, ' 'not only cannot be hastened, but some- 
times it is very hard. As a general rule, indeed, 
it is very difficult; it is not easy to grow in grace. 
Some of us live too near the smoke ever to be very 
great trees, or even very fruitful bushes. Circum- 
stances are heavily against us; we are not placed 
in favorable localities or under very gracious con- 
ditions. The house is small, the income is little, 
the children are many and noisy, the demands up- 
on time and attention and patience are incessant, 
health is not very good and cheerful, the 'tempera- 
ment is a little despondent and very susceptible to 
injurious influences, and how to grow in Christ 
Jesus under such circumstances as these, the Sa- 
viour himself only knows.' ' 

St. John, the Evangelist, gives us an instance 



60 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

of spiritual loss in the case of the Apostle Peter. 
Jesus had been speaking of his death and said, 
' 'Whither I go, ye cannot come." Peter replied, 
1 'Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay 
down my life for thy sake." Here is a declara- 
tion of faith, devotion, and courage leading him 
on through the gates of death. It was not long 
till a cloud of trouble cast a shadow over the spirit 
of the Apostle. Then he slept in the Garden of 
Gethsemane while his Lord wept aloud in agony. 
When the soldiers came to take the Master even 
then the Apostle Peter was ready with his drawn 
sword to defend the life of his Teacher. But 
while the trial was in progress before the Sanhe- 
drin ' 'Peter stood at the door without." He was 
even then losing ground. John himself went out 
and brought Peter in. A damsel said to Peter, 
"Art not thou also one of this man's disciples?" 
"I am not" was his reply. Trouble, and slumber, 
and fear had wrought erosion of his faith, devo- 
tion, and courage. "I am not" he repeated three 
times and when the cock crew Jesus looked into 
the face of Peter who wept over his weakness. If 
he had watched the first ditches forming in the 
field of his faith and devotion he would not have 
seen the best of his character washed away. The 
flood came and his courage crumbled. This is the 
significance of our Lord's warning to him in Geth- 
semane. The badly eroded field has often been re- 
stored to fertility and fruitfulness, and fortunate- 
ly for the Apostle Peter he was later re-instated in 
a Savior's love. It is well for us to look often to 
the fields of our consecration to the Lord Jesus 
Christ lest the rills and rivulets of carelessness run 
into guilty denials and into wickedness of which 
we had not dreamed. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 61 

The erosion which the love of the world makes 
on our spiritual life is also noted by the Beloved 
Apostle. In his first letter St. John expresses deep 
interest in a matter so important when, in great 
earnestness, he writes: "Love not the world, 
neither the things that are in the world. If any 
man love the world, the love of the Father is not 
in him." Here he names two great loves, the love 
of God and the love of the world, and he assures 
us that these two loves are exclusive of one another. 
A block of marble and a block of granite can not 
occupy the same space at the same time. A bunch 
of roses and a bunch of thorns are better apart. 
Better not take a field of wheat and try to make of 
it a field of thistles. Intense and excessive world- 
liness in the heart forms a hard under-lying rock 
which comes up very near the surface, and the soil 
for any better growth is apt to be shallow, and 
easily eroded. In this granitic soil supported from 
beneath by rock, the Evangelist notes the growth 
of three noxious thistles: "The lust of the flesh/ ' 
which is none other but debasing to the spiritual 
life; "the lust of the eyes," which looks to the vis- 
ible things of the world, and shuts out the vision 
of God and eternity; "and the pride of life," 
which has only scorn for the lowly Nazarene. 
When the practical farmer comes to a field under- 
girded with rock, having only a thin soil and that 
badly infested with thistles, the first thing he does 
is to clear out the noxious weeds, and then be sows 
the grain which soon grows into the golden har- 
vest. Too much worthless stuff on the ground 
means no harvest of good. This is St. John's in- 
terpretation of spiritual husbandry. 

Another erosion of the spiritual life is wrought 
by doubt. This is brought out in the case of 



62 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

Thomas, one of the twelve Apostles. The other 
Apostles and many of the disciples had accepted 
belief in the resurrection of Christ to their great 
joy and comfort, but Thomas was skeptical. His 
skepticism led him to separate himself from his 
brethren. Erosive doubt had already robbed 
Thomas of the joy of fellowship with his fellow-be- 
lievers, as they had been hitherto. St. John says 
of him: "But Thomas, one of the twelve, called 
Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came." 
His doubts had even prevented him from enjoying 
the companionship of Jesus, his friend and Savior. 
The spirit of inquiry and investigation, however, 
and true faith may be found in harmony with one 
another. George John Romanes justly says: 
' 'The great advance of natural knowledge which 
has characterized the present century, has caused 
our ideas upon many subjects connected with phil- 
osophy to undergo a complete metamorphosis. A 
well-educated man of the present day is absolutely 
precluded from regarding some of the Christian 
dogmas from the same intellectual standpoint as 
his forefathers, even though he may still continue 
to accept them in some other sense. In short, our 
whole key of thinking or tone of thought having 
been in certain respects changed, we can no long- 
er anticipate that in these respects it should con- 
tinue to harmonize with the unalterable system of 
theology." In making this concession Romanes 
does not aim to discount true faith; he admits 
freely that the angle of vision has changed. ' 'It 
is much more easy," says Romanes, defining his 
position more fully, ' 'to disbelieve than to believe. 
This is obvious on the side of reason, but it is also 
true on that of the spirit, for to disbelieve is in 
accordance with environment or custom, while to 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 63 

believe necessitates a spiritual use of the imagina- 
tion. For both these reasons, very few unbeliev- 
ers have any justification, either intellectual or 
spiritual, for their own unbelief. Unbelief is 
usually due to indolence, often to prejudice, and 
never a thing to be proud of." 



64 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"Look on this beautiful world, and read the truth 

In her fair page; see, every season brings 

New change, to her, of everlasting youth, 

Still the green soil, with joyous living things, 

Swarms, the wide air is full of joyous wings, 

And myriads, still, are happy in the sleep 

Of ocean's azure gulfs, and where he flings 

The restless surge. Eternal Love doth keep 

In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep." 

—William Cullen Bryant. 

"What things by their unaided effort gain 

The shores of light, rear an unfruitful head, 

But proud and lusty; for productive power 

Is in the soil. Yet even such, if man 

Engraft or move them to a well-worked trench, 

Renounce their sylvan creed and meekly take, 

With careful management, what shape you please."— Virgil. 

"And feelingly the Sage shall make report 
How insecure, how baseless in itself, 
Is the Philosophy whose sway depends 
On mere material instruments;— how weak 
Those arts, and high inventions, if unpropped 
By virtue."— Wordsworth. 

"He that directs the wandering traveller, 
Doth, as it were, light another's torch by his own; 
Which gives him ne'er the less of light, for that 
It gave another." — Ennius. 

"A mind of genuine wisdom is a thing 
A man should cling to, as polypuses fix 
Their body to a rock."— Sophocles. 

"Philosophers are wholly taken up in the seeking out of Truth, and 
perfectly neglect and make light of those things which the rest of the world 
are so eager after, and so contend about."— Plato. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 65 



SECTION VII. 



Conservation of Essential Spiritual Elements; Truth. 

Soils and farms lose some of their value, not 
only by erosion as we have seen, but also by the 
loss of essential elements. Certain elements are 
absolutely necessary to the fertility of the soil. 
Soils many feet deep are worthless, if they lack 
certain chemical substances which nourish the life 
of plants and grains. When we reflect on the fact 
that man receives his daily bread and his clothing 
from the ground, and that all animals are sustain- 
ed by the products of the soil, then we learn some- 
thing of what a calamity it would mean to us, if 
our lands should lose their power to produce life 
and fruitage. Bacon says that the word calamity 
was first derived from calamus, when the corn 
could not get out of the stalk. If the day should 
ever come in the United States or any other coun- 
try when the corn could not get out of the stalk, 
it would indeed spread universal calamity among 
us. But this very disaster has happened in some 
of our fields. The reason for these dead fields is 
found in the fact that the elements essential to the 
support of life have been lost. These essential 
substances have been lost from the soil, and fur- 
ther life has become an impossibility. The Presi- 
dent of Wisconsin University, Charles Richard 



66 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

Van Hise, tells us in exact words what the ele- 
ments of plant food are: "The constituents of 
plants are few in number,— hydrogen, oxygen, 
carbon; silicon, calcium, nitrogen, potassium, phos- 
phorus, with minute quantities of less important 
elements, such as iron, magnesium, sodium, sul- 
phur and chloride. Of the eight important ele- 
ments the first five are practically illimitable in 
amount so far as plant and animal food are con- 
cerned. Hydrogen and oxygen are the chief con- 
stituents of water; the latter constitutes one-fifth 
of the atmosphere and occurs combined with car- 
bon. The supply of these elements in an available 
form is inexhaustible. The plants with the as- 
sistance of the sun take their carbon from the car- 
bon dioxide in the atmosphere, or that produced 
by decaying vegetation in the soil. When plants 
and animals decompose they return in large meas- 
ure their carbon to the air as carbon dioxide. Al- 
so the combustion of coal adds each year an enor- 
mous supply of carbon dioxide to the air. 
Therefore there will be no shortage of carbon for 
the plants. There is an abundant supply of cal- 
cium in most soils and an illimitable supply of 
calcium in limestone which may be drawn upon for 
those soils deficient in this element. Silicon is the 
most abundant of the elements. It therefore 
turns out, that of the materials we need to feed 
the plants to feed our bodies, the vital elements 
are nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. It is 
these three elements only to which we need to di- 
rect our attention from the point of view of con- 
servation.' ' 

Nitrogen, one of the elements difficult to sup- 
ply properly to the soil, is defined as a colorless, 
gaseous, nonmetallic element, tasteless and odor- 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 67 

less, comprising four-fifths of the atmosphere by 
volume. It is chemically very inert in the free 
state, and as such is incapable of supporting life; 
but it forms many important compounds, as amo- 
nia, nitric acid, and the cyanides. Nitrogen is a 
constituent of all organized living tissues, animal 
or vegetable. Vegetable matter decaying in the 
ground, called humus, and certain bacteria furnish 
nitrates to the soil. The great source of nitrogen 
for plant food is the atmosphere. Clover, alfalfa, 
and cowpeas are among the very few plants which 
take the nitrogen out of the air. On the roots of 
these plants small knots are formed, and these 
knots become the hiding place for the bacteria 
which take the nitrogen from the air, and deposit 
it in the soil for plant food. This fact is one of the 
miracles of modern agriculture, and it has been 
worth its many thousands to the men who till our 
fields. Another effective method of putting nitro- 
gen into the ground is by the liberal use of fertil- 
izers. This fact is well known. Modern science 
has also made known the fact that electricity can 
be used in forming nitrates for the support of 
plant life. The electric method is even now used 
extensively in Europe, and it opens a wide field 
for future cultivation. The loss of nitrogen from 
our soils is one of our most serious losses. To un- 
dertake to grow corn, or wheat, or cotton, or to- 
bacco on the same piece of ground, year after 
year, will rob the soil of its supply of nitrogen. 
This is one of the ways to depletion and ruin. 
Will a man rob his field of nitrogen by single 
cropping and still expect that field to support him 
and his family? If he is so foolish as to do this 
his case is not hopeless for the reason that science 
has learned the means by which nitrogen can be 



68 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

restored. His loss is not crucial; it can be repair- 
ed. 

Potassium is another element that a plant 
must have to live. If water is run through wood 
ashes it will carry out with it potassium* One 
hundred bushels of corn, according to Hopkins, 
contain nineteen pounds of potassium. Our fields 
are estimated to have a sufficient supply of potas- 
sium to produce a hundred bushels of corn to the 
acre for hundreds of years. There are also large 
potassium deposits in Germany. So potassium is 
not what is called a crucial element: it can be sup- 
plied when lost from the soil. 

Phosphorus is such an important element in the 
soil that life can not be sustained without it. The 
brain cannot live without it; so of bone, and flesh, 
and blood. It has been proven at the Wisconsin 
Expermient Station that an animal fed on a ration 
deficient in phosphate collapsed in three months. 
When the supply of phosphate failed the flesh of 
the animal, the flesh drew the phosphate from the 
bones, and then the bones collapsed. It is esti- 
mated that an acre of land, soil eight inches deep, 
contains about three thousand pounds of phos- 
phoric oxide. Our lands are losing this absolutely 
necessary element of phosphorus. In some of our 
best states one-half of the phosphorus is lost from 
the soil. A report given by Hopkins is to the ef- 
fect that an analysis of depleted land in Turkey, 
Asia, furnished no phosphorus to be found in the 
surface soil. Phosphorus is called a crucial ele- 
ment and its loss from the soil is of the most 
grave character. Let us now consider character 
as an essential element of life. 

Character is the sum total of the Christian 
Religion in so far as man is concerned. Christian 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 69 

integrity and character are the finished product of 
that Religion which has its source in God the 
Father, in God the Son, and in God the Holy 
Ghost. The most excellent character is the most 
complete embodiment of the religion of Jesus 
Christ. The character of Job took its pattern 
from Heaven, and his character became linked to 
God. Even one such character is worth more to 
men than empires. The character of Jesus is not 
only a pattern for men, but it is a wonder to all the 
heavenly intelligences. Angels from Heaven 
have looked into the character of Jesus with in- 
tense interest and wonder. The character of St. 
John was shaped by the eternities, and it will be 
an inspiration through eternity. The moral sub- 
limity of the characetr of St. Paul transcends all 
the Caesars who ever ruled the Roman Empire. 
The character of Martin Luther made Germany 
what she is today. The character of Jonathan 
Edwards was a potent factor in New England. 
Dr. Christlieb has well said that the Christian man 
is the only Bible that is read by the man of the 
world. Christian integrity, unshaken by dominant 
wickedness, is the Bible incarnated. For lack of 
such integrity and character the Roman Empire 
perished. It was this lack that baptized France 
with blood at the time of her Revolution. Even 
the Greek philosopher, Socrates, felt the need of 
character founded on a Divine basis. "In respect 
to these great questions," said he, "we ought to 
take the best of human reasonings, that which is 
most difficult to be confuted, and embark on it as 
on a raft, so to sail through life amid its storms, 
unless we could be carried more safely in a surer 
conveyance furnished in some Divine instruction " 
That "Divine instruction' ' for which Socrates 



70 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

yearned has been given us in the Gospel, and 1 , we 
are now individually responsible for the makeup of 
our character. Carlyle does not overstate the case 
when he says: "Man is the architect of circum- 
stance. Our strength is measured by our plastic 
power. From the same materials one man builds 
palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another 
villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks un- 
til the architect makes them something else. Thus 
it is that, in the same family, in the same circum- 
stances, one rears a stately edifice, while his 
brother, vacillating and incompetent, lives forever 
amid ruins.' ' As plant life is fed on certain ele- 
ments from the soil, so Christian character is nur- 
tured by all the elements of truth found in Revela- 
tion. St. John indicates some of these essential 
spiritual elements, and they are worthy of our 
most earnest thought. 

First, Truth. The universe is full of truth, 
and associated with it in all its parts is error. To 
discern truth from all forms of error is one of the 
first duties of a Christian man, because character 
grows with truth and it becomes enfeebled when 
it feeds on error and falsehood. St. John says of 
Our Lord that he was "full of grace and truth.' ' 
Grace baptized Truth in the person of Jesus, and 
Truth supported His life. ' 'Ye shall know the 
truth, and the truth shall make you free," is St. 
John's quotation from the words of Christ. 
Truth thus becomes the source of all true liberty, 
the true freedom of the soul. "Howbeit when 
he," says John again, "the Spirit of truth, is 
come, he will guide you into all truth." Truth 
flows as a river, from the Godhead and becomes a 
blessing to all men. St. John also relates the in- 
cidents of the memorable interview between Pilate 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 71 

and Jesus. Pilate asked: "Art Thou a king 
then?" Jesus made this reply: "To this end was 
I born, and for this cause came I into the world, 
that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every 
one that is of the truth heareth my voice." Then 
Pilate asked: "What is truth?" Pilate's question 
is one of the greatest questions of the ages, be- 
cause the life that we live depends upon the an- 
swer. 

Bacon has made some observations on truth 
which are worth while even in our day. "Truth, 
which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the in- 
quiry of truth, which is the love-making, or woo- 
ing of it— the knowledge of truth, which is the 
presence of it- and the belief of truth, which is 
the enjoying of it—is the sovereign good of human 
nature." So Bacon's view is that truth brings su- 
preme satisfaction to the mind w T hich embraces 
it. Truth is certainly one of the essential spiritual 
elements which must be supplied to the whole 
nature of man for his solid well-being. Lucretius, 
the Latin poet, remarks that "it is a pleasure to 
stand upon the shore, and see ships tost upon the 
sea; a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, 
and see a battle, and the adventures thereof below; 
but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon 
the vantage ground of truth (a hill not to be com- 
manded, and where the air is always clear and se- 
rene), and to see the errors, and wanderings, and 
mists, and tempests, in the vale below," and Ba- 
con judiciously adds, "So always that this pros- 
pect be with pity, and not with swelling or pride." 
Archbishop Whately comments on truth when he* 
says: "Courage, liberality, activity, and other 
good qualities, are often prized by those who do> 
not possess them to any great degree; but the' 



72 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

zealous, thorough-going love of truth is not very 
much admired or liked, or indeed understood, ex- 
cept by those who possess it." According to this 
writer, the diligent search after truth does not ap- 
peal to popular applause, and this is especially 
true for the man who is seeking after spiritual 
truth. But spiritual truth is our highest good, and 
even if we must be torn down and built up anew, 
we should never stop short of possessing satisfac- 
tory knowledge of Divine things. Coleridge in 
speaking of the influence of the Sophists among 
the Greeks observes: "By the constitution of our 
nature, as far as it is human nature, so awful is 
truth, that as long as we have faith in its attaina- 
bility and hopes of its attainment, there exists no 
bribe strong enough to tempt us wholly and per- 
manently from our allegiance." When error and 
false teaching have become interwoven in the fab- 
ric of all social life and thought, even truth itself 
becomes a scandal as it is boldly proclaimed. It 
was under such conditions that Martin Luther ex- 
claimed: "Scandal and offence! Talk not to me 
of scandal and offence. Need breaks through 
stone walls, and recks not of scandal. It is my 
duty to spare weak consciences as far as it may be 
done without hazard of my soul. Where not, I 
must take counsel for my soul, though half or the 
whole world should be scandalized thereby." It 
has long been known to the world that truth is de- 
structive as well as constructive. In recognition of 
this fact Tertullian says: "Let it fly away, all 
that chaff of light faith that can fly off at any 
breath of temptation; the cleaner will the true 
grain be stored up in the granary of the Lord." 
Coleridge commends this courageous proclamation 
■of truth in language at one just and beautiful: 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 73 

* 'Luther felt and preached and acted, as beseemed 
a Luther to feel smd utter and act. The truths, 
which had been outraged, he re-proclaimed in the 
spirit of outraged truth, at the behest of his con- 
science and in the service of the God of truth. He 
did his duty, come good, come evil! and made no 
question, on which side the preponderance would 
be. In the one scale there was gold, and impress- 
ed thereon the image and superscription of the un- 
iversal Sovereign.' ' 

It is a matter of interest to us to understand 
how so much error and falsehood and false philos- 
ophy have crept into the world, especially since it 
is known that truth is so universal, so great and 
so wholesome. Why shoirid our fields be so foul 
with noxious weeds when thousands of acres of 
wheat should be ready for the sickle? This is a 
matter of so much concern that it is worthy of at 
least a brief investigation. The mind of man is 
like a field which may be filled with evil or good. 
' 'A mixture of a lie," says Bacon, "doth ever add 
pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were 
taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering 
hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, 
and the like, but it would leave the minds of a 
number of men poor shrunken things?" How do 
these vain opinions and false valuations happen to 
find lodgment in the minds of men? Bacon also 
gives us this significant suggestion: "It is not the 
lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that 
sinketh in and settleth in it that doth the hurt." 
The danger is not the false faith, but the hospitali- 
ty which we offer to the false faith. When a false 
theory of life once gets through our doors and 
finds shelter in our minds, then it sets up a claim 
to abide with us. It may be years before we dis- 



74 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

cover that we have given hospitality to a false 
idea of life. For years St. Paul entertained the 
idea that religion was Pharisaical, moral and out- 
ward, but he finally drove from himself this false 
guest and received Hirn who is life, and ever after 
enjoyed the inward, vital life of the Spirit which 
gave him liberty. Archbishop Whately describes 
this process by which error insinuates itself into 
our breasts, and he makes a clear case of how 
self-deception is often wrought. "It is to be re- 
membered also/ ' he says, "that the intellectual 
powers are sometimes pressed into the service, as it 
were, of the feelings, and that a man may thus be 
misled, in a great measure, through his own in- 
genuity. 'Depend on it, ' said a shrewd observer, 
when inquired of, what was to be expected of a 
certain man who had been appointed to some high 
office, and of whose intelligence he thought more 
favorably than of his uprightness, — 'depend on it, 
he will never take any step that is bad, without 
having a very good reason for it. ' Now it is com- 
mon to warn men— and they are generally ready 
enough to take the warning— against being thus 
misled by the ingenuity of another; but a person 
of more than ordinary learning and ability needs 
to be carefully on his guard against being misled 
by his own." Thus sound reasoning becomes 
warped by self-interest and then sophistry com- 
pletes the self-deception. Superior intelligence 
makes its polite bow finally to interest and inclina- 
tions. 

Do we trace our self-deceptions to the intel- 
lect, the pride of all our faculties? We are hardly 
accustomed to do so. We naturally take pride in 
the acuteness of the intellect while we are often 
ashamed to give way to our feelings. Do we think 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 75 

enough of the fact that untruth and error delight 
in getting into the intellect itself? Can the intel- 
lect itself become incapacitated for truth? Can 
the intellect, the seat of intelligence, lose its cap- 
acity to receive and retain truth? Can the intel- 
lect and truth become utterly alienated? Can er- 
ror saturate the intellect so thoroughly that there 
is no room left for truth? These are questions 
which involve much and they are entitled to an an- 
swer. Isaiah speaks of ' 'them that call evil good, 
and good evil; that put darkness for light, and 
light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and 
sweet for bitter!" This is a fair sample of intel- 
lectual self-deception. The intelligence looks 
straight at light and pronounces it darkness! The 
same intelligence becomes enveloped in the black- 
ness of night and declares that it is in the midst 
of day! This intelligence looks at evil and names 
it good; at good, and calls it evil! This is a fine 
art of the intellect, and surely the ''mixture of a 
lie doth ever add pleasure !" 

The best writers and philosophers all recognize 
the fact that the intellect must be subjected to a 
certain witchery before it can lose its proper pow- 
er of discernment. Coleridge pictures this en- 
chantment so that any one can understand it. 
"Pleasure, most often delusive/ ' he reasons, " may 
be born of delusion. Pleasure, herself a sorceress, 
may pitch her tents on enchanted ground. But 
happiness can be built on virtue alone, and must 
of necessity have truth for its foundation/ ' Thus 
the proud, discerning intellect is brought under 
the spell of bewitchment. In this sense Pope's 
lines apply to the strongest intellects: 

"Next where the sirens dwell you plow the seas; 
Their song is death, and makes destruction please." 



76 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

The final statement of how the intellect may 
lose its capacity for truth is here left to Coleridge. 
It is known to all that the Greeks came to their 
decline and fall as many other nations have done. 
The secret of that decline Coleridge traces back to 
the intellect which was the glory of Greek civiliza- 
tion. "The cupidity for dissipation and sensual 
pleasure in all ranks," as he says, "had kept pace 
with the increasing inequality in the means of 
gratifying it. The restless spirit of republican 
ambition, engendered by their success in a just 
war, and by the romantic character of that suc- 
cess, had already formed a close alliance with lux- 
ury; with luxury, too, in its early and most vigor- 
ous state, when it acts as an appetite to enkindle, 
and before it has exhausted and dulled the vital 
energies by the habit of enjoyment. But this cor- 
ruption was now to be introduced into the citadel 
of the moral being, and to be openly defended by 
the very arms and instruments, which had been 
given for the purpose of preventing or chastening 
its approach. The understanding was to be cor- 
rupted by the perversion of the reason, and the 
feelings through the medium of the understanding. 
For this purpose all fixed principles, whether 
grounded on reason, religion, law, or antiquity, 
were to be undermined, and then, as now, chiefly 
by the sophistry of submitting all positions alike, 
however heterogeneous, to the criterion of the 
mere understanding. At all events the minds of 
men were to be sensualized; and even if the argu- 
ments themselves failed, yet the principles so at- 
tacked were to be brought into doubt by the mere 
frequency of hearing all things doubted, and the 
most sacred of all now openly denied, and now in- 
sulted by sneer and ridicule." 



78 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"For it is ill to know, 

And it is ill to do, 

Beyond the law's inexorable bound."— Euripides. 

"Then indeed all the affairs of life grow rotten, 
When men are minded to cure wrong with wrong." 

—Sophocles. 

"If we say that we have felllowship with Him, and walk in darkness, 
we lie, and do not the Truth. "—St. John. 

"For easy leisure brings forth nothing good, 
Nor any God assists the indolent."— Sophocles. 

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the Truth 
is not in us."— St. John. 

"If thou didst harm, then thou must suffer harm, 

And the Golden Eye of Righteousness 

Sees and rewards the unrighteous."— Sophocles. 

"No one man, as we have often seen, has all the Truth, nor ought to 
set himself up as the papal administrator of all that is right and wrong in 
intellectual beliefs. This man has part of the truth, and his brother has 
another part; they should meet, and mutually contribute; and the third man 
should add his share, and every other man contribute his quota, that from 
the sum-total of humanity we may get the sum-total of the revelation of 
God."— Dr. Joseph Parker. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 79 



SECTION VIIJ. 



HALF-TRUTHS AND WRONG CONCLUSIONS. 

He who would conserve truth must be on his 
guard against half-truths and wrong conclusions 
often arising from them. One truth is not the 
whole truth, and one truth cannot be made to con- 
stitute the whole truth. A single truth does not 
stand alone, but it stands related to many other 
groups of truth. There is not enough fertility in 
a single truth to properly nourish and support the 
soul. The man with one idea, if that idea be a 
small one, is sure to stumble and fall, and for the 
reason that one thought does not furnish sufficient 
nourishment for the mind. The great oak of the 
forest is supported by many roots, and not by one 
only. It required many foundation stones to 
properly support Solomon's Temple, and the mind 
must have the broad foundation of truth for a 
base in order to a comely growth. A half-truth is 
apt to become dangerous, as the leaning tower of 
Pisa always looks dangerous, and is more danger- 
ous than if it stood erect. One of God's greatest 
gifts to man is Intelligence and this Intelligence 
as a flame is designed to illuminate the highway of 
truth. Cartwright in Lady -Err ant does not over- 
state the case when he says, 



80 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

"The soul doth give 
Brightness to the eye: and some say, that the sun 
If not enlighten'd by th' Intelligence 
That doth inhabit it, would shine no more 
Than a dull clod of earth." 

It is one of the fortunate conditions of our life 
that many vital truths are self-evident to this In- 
telligence with which we are endowed. "There 
are truths so self-evident/' says Coleridge, "or so 
immediately and palpably deduced from those that 
are, or are acknowledged for such, that they are 
intelligible to all men who possess the common ad- 
vantages of the social state, although by sophis- 
try, by evil habits, by neglect, false persuasions, 
and impostures of an anti-Christian priesthood 
joined in one conspiracy with the violence of ty- 
rannical governors, the understandings of men 
may become so darkened and their consciences so 
lethargic, that a necessity will arise for the repub- 
lication of those truths, and this too with a voice 
of loud alarm, and impassioned warning/' While 
many truths are thus self-evident, it is not every 
man who looks before he leaps into the ditch 
which a half-truth is liable to open for him. The 
careless pursuit of truth will not answer the stern 
demands of our life, and it is poor consolation to 
recall the fact that we have not blundered as fa- 
tally as others. The following couplet shows the 
result of carelessness in our search for truth : 

"Truth I pursued, as fancy sketched the way, 
And wiser men than I went worse astray," 

One of the unfortunate habits of the mind is 
to become confused in its search for truth, and 
when this confusion has wrought its worst, a 
half-truth readily becomes an error which leads 
of ten to disaster. Aristophanes describes such a 
man most admirably when he says: "It is with 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 81 

you as with those that are hunting for eels. 
While the pond is clear and settled, they take 
nothing; but if they stir up the mud high and low, 
then they bring up the fish:— and you succeed only 
as far as you can set the state in tumult and confu- 
sion." These are the muddy waters out of which 
have come Christian Science, so-called, Mormon- 
ism, and Dowieism, and such like movements. 
The clear waters of reason and intelligence do not 
give rise to such errors, but when the waters be- 
come muddy then see what monsters can be 
brought to the surface of society. 

It is another unfortunate trick of the mind 
that it finally becomes eager for that which is er- 
roneous and false. "Such is the iniquity of men," 
says Jeremy Taylor, "That they suck in opinions 
as wild asses do the wind, without distinguishing 
the wholesome from the corrupted air, and then 
live upon it at a venture: and when all their confi- 
dence is built on zeal and mistake; yet therefore, 
because they are zealous and mistaken, they are 
impatient of contradiction. If an opinion plainly 
and directly brings in a crime, as if a man preach- 
es treason or sedition, his opinion is not his ex- 
cuse. A man is nevertheless a traitor because he 
believes it lawful to commit treason; and a man is 
a murderer if he kills his brother unjustly, al- 
though he should think that he was doing God 
good service thereby." Anarchy is a wild ass 
coming out of the desert into society, inhaling the 
noxious air of civilization. Coleridge does not put 
it too strong when he says: "To dogmatize crime, 
that is, to teach it as a doctrine, is itself a crime, 
great or small as the crime dogmatized is more or 
less palpably so." 

Truth does not fear controversy, but a half- 



82 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

truth often seeks seclusion from argument. The 
devout Christian Scientist who bears such an ex- 
alted title often shuts the door to all argument, 
and reason is dismissed as not needed. Such a 
course is the last resort of fanaticism, and it buries 
all the rational faculties of the soul. There is no 
genuine religion without reason. This matter is 
of such great weight that the words of Saint Aug- 
ustine are here introduced. "Censures, offered in 
friendliness,' ' he says, "we ought to receive with 
gratitude: yea, though our opinions did not merit 
the censure, we should still be thankful for the at- 
tack on them, were it only that it gives us an op- 
portunity of successfully defending the same. For 
never doth an important truth spread its roots so 
wide or clasp the soil so stubbornly, as when it has 
braved the winds of controversy. There is a stir- 
ring and a far-heard music sent forth from the 
tree of sound knowledge, when its branches are 
fighting with the storm, which passing onward 
shrills out at once truth's triumph and its own de- 
feat." The storm of error has often assaulted 
society and the Church, but they have come out of 
it all renewed in strength and noble purpose. The 
testimony of Coleridge is also of great force in this 
connection. He says: "Every man's opinion has 
a right to pass into the common auditory, if his 
reason for the opinion is paid down at the same 
time, for arguments are the sole current coin of 
the intellect. The degree of influence to which 
the opinion is entitled should be proportioned to 
the w r eight and value of the reasons for it." 

At the same time a half-truth may lead to 
needless controversy, and the contestants may 
wage their war with the utmost sincerity, and all 
to no profit. Blood has been shed because some 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 83 

knights said the shield was gold and others said 
that it was silver, and in truth both were wrong 
and both were right. Some approached 

"The shield 
Of human nature from the golden side, 
And would have fought even to the death to attest 
The quality of the metal which they saw." 

Truth gains nothing by such controversy as all 
parties concerned soon discover. The half-truth 
of the shield left its dead on the field, however, 
and many another half-truth has left its victims 
mental and moral wrecks on the sands of time. 

But it is when a half-truth is in alliance with 
positive wickedness that the greatest havoc is 
wrought in States and Churches. At first thought 
such an alliance seems an impossibility, but his- 
tory makes known some strange facts in human 
nature. Semi-holiness is seen to have been wed- 
ded to wickedness of the most flagrant character. 
When Macaulay wrote his History of England 
some of his studies led him into an investigation of 
this mixture of half -good and evil in the make-up 
of men. Macaulay's conclusions will have weight 
while the world stands. It is unfortunate that 
such a movement should be traced even in a re- 
mote way to the Christian religion. "It was not 
strange that people of all ranks,' ' says Macaulay, 
1 'And especially of the highest ranks, crowded to 
the confessionals in the Jesuit temples: for from 
these confessionals none went discontented away. 
There the priest was all things to all men. He 
showed just as much rigour as might not drive 
those who knelt at his spiritual tribunal to the 
Dominican or the Franciscan church. If he had 
to deal with a mind truly devout, he spoke in the 
saintly tones of the primitive fathers: but with 
that large part of mankind who have religion 



84 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

enough to make them uneasy when they do wrong, 
and not religion enough to keep them from doing 
wrong, he allowed a different system. Since he 
could not reclaim them from vice, it was his busi- 
ness to save them from remorse. He had at his 
command an immense dispensary of anodynes for 
wounded 'consciences. In the books of casuistry 
which had been written by his brethren, and 
printed with the approbation of his superiors, 
were to be found doctrines consolatory to trans- 
gressors of every class. There the bankrupt was 
taught how he might, without sin, secret his goods 
from his creditors. The servant was taught 
how he might, without sin, run off with his 
master's plate. The pandar was assured that 
a Christian man might innocently earn his living 
by carrying letters and messages between mar- 
ried women and their gallants. The high spirited 
and punctilious gentlemen of France were gratifi- 
ed by a decision in favor of duelling. The Ital- 
ians, accustomed to darker and baser modes of 
vengeance, were glad to learn that they might, 
without any crime, shoot at their enemies from 
behind hedges. To deceit was given a license suf- 
ficient to destroy the whole value of human con- 
tracts and of human testimony. In truth, if so- 
ciety continued to hold together, if life and prop- 
erty enjoyed any security, it was because common 
sense and common humanity restrained men from 
doing what the Order of Jesus assured them that 
they might with a safe conscience do. So 
strangely were good and evil intermixed in the 
character of these celebrated brethren; and the 
intermixture was the secret of their gigantic pow- 
er. That power could never have belonged to 
mere hypocrites. It never could have belonged 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 85 

to rigid moralists. It was to be obtained only by- 
men sincerely enthusiastic in the pursuit of a great 
end, and at the same time unscrupulous as to the 
choice of means." 

The whole truth is the abiding need of the soul 
of man, and that soul cannot live properly till 
it breathes the atmosphere of the whole universe. 
God alone is infinitude and He alone can satisfy 
the soul made in His image. Dr. Joseph Parker 
justly says: "No man can touch the truth with- 
out touching the whole kingdom of heaven; no 
man can injure a single truth without injuring the 
whole quantity called truth, for the truth is not a 
question of single filaments and threads, particles 
and details: the truth is one, indissoluble, and to 
touch it to the injury of any part of it is to touch 
it to the pain of its very heart. The universe is 
one: some of us worship in one place and some in 
another; but to God there is no space that can be 
mapped out as separate localities. He filleth all 
in all. If you are not against him you are on his 
side. Therein have I sometimes endeavored to 
teach men that though they be not nominally in 
Christ they may be under the inspiration of his 
Spirit. Men know not what they do even when 
they put the Son of God to shame. There is a for- 
giveness that may follow their blasphemy; there is 
in heaven a consideration for human ignorance, 
though that ignorance culminate in the tragedy of 
Gethsemane and Golgotha. Truth, let me say 
again and again, is one as the universe is one. 
There is nothing despicable or contemptible; the 
fall of the sparrow is watched, and the very hairs 
of your head are all numbered. God putteth our 
tears all in his bottle, and he writes our names in 
his book of life. Sacred universe, sensitive uni- 



86 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

verse; if I lift a hand I send a shudder to the 
stars/ ' 

Then we have the final word of Revelation in 
the language of St. John, the beloved Apostle. In 
his first letter, good man that he was, he gives 
this caution: ' 'Beloved, believe not every spirit, 
but try the spirits whether they are of God: be- 
cause many false prophets are gone out into the 
world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every 
spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in 
the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confess- 
eth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not 
of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, where- 
of ye have heard that it should come; and even 
now already is it in the world." 



88 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"An upright man, and of just sentiments, 

Discerns far more than a philosopher." — Sophocles. 

"Nothing is so inimical to Christian belief as un-Christian conduct. 
This is especially the case as regards impurity; for whether the fact be ex- 
plained on religious or non-religious grounds, it has more to do with unbe- 
lief than has the speculative reason."— George John Romanes. 

"What can I know? What ought I to do? And for what may I 
hope?" — Immanuel Kant. 

"What can be taught, I learn: what can be found 

I seek; the rest I did not require of heaven."— Sophocles. 

"The unbiased answer of pure agnosticism ought reasonably to be, in 
the words of John Hunter, 'Do not think: try.' That is, in this case, try the 
only experiment available— the experiment of Faith. Do the doctrine, and 
if Christianity be true, the verification will come, not indeed immediately 
through any course of speculative reason, but immediately by spiritual in- 
tuition."— George John Romanes. 

"If any man will do His will he shall know of the doctrine, whether it 
be of God."— St. John. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 89 



SECTION IX. 



CONSERVATION OF FAITH. 

He who would conserve Christian character 
must conserve Faith as well as Truth. Faith im- 
parts fiber to moral character and ennobles all the 
faculties of the soul. Faith sees far into the fu- 
ture and comforts the soul in the midst of life's dis- 
appointments and sorrows. Faith helps to enkindle 
Hope and supports us where fear and doubt would 
fail us. Faith discovers glorious worlds of future 
good where doubt would plunge us into the black- 
ness of night. Faith surveys the realms of eter- 
nity while sight is shut in by the horizon of time. 
Faith concerns itself with that which is spiritual 
while sight is confined to that which is material. 
Faith takes hold on God, and sight takes hold on 
matter. The highest that is within us delights in 
the exercise of faith, and it is only our lower na- 
ture that is involved in the use of sight. Faith 
based on sound reason has no limitations, but sight 
is always circumscribed. He who dares to doubt 
must be prepared to drop into the abyss of black- 
ness into which doubt inevitably leads. Have you 
ever looked into that abyss? Richter describes 
this bottomless pit of un-faith in a manner not to 
be forgotten. He represents Jesus as returning to 
a group of shadows gathered in a church, and say- 



90 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

ing: "I have traversed the worlds, I have risen 
to the suns, with the milky ways I have passed 
athwart the great waste places of the sky; there is 
no God. And I descended to where the very 
shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I 
gazed out into the gulf beyond, and cried, 'Father: 
where art Thou?' But answer came there none, 
save the eternal storm which rages on, controlled 
by none; and toward the west, above the chasm, a 
gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to 
give it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into 
the gulf. Shriek on, then, discords; shatter the 
shadows with your shrieking din, for He is not." 
Tennyson has also described in flowing numbers 
the soul that has yielded up faith. Such unfortu- 
nate souls are 

"Like birds the charming serpent draws, 
To drop head-foremost in the jaws 
Of vacant darkness and to cease." 

The man who is inclined to indulge any natur- 
al bent toward unwarranted skepticism should not 
only think of the blank abyss into which it plunges 
him, but he should also think of its subjective ef- 
fect, of its effect on his own mind. Doubt 
belittles and contracts the soul and deprives 
the spirit of its noble birthright. Faith is gener- 
ous, but skepticism is punctilious and parsimoni- 
ous. Faith points the way to liberty, but doubt 
leads to bondage. Faith leads to a larger growth 
while doubt dwarfs beyond remedy when indulged 
to excess. This is seen in the life of one of the 
Apostles of our Lord. Wordsworth penetrates to 
the inmost soul of Thomas, and drives the effect of 
doubt to its last analysis, when he says of him, 

"A smooth-rubbed soul to which could cling 
No form of feeling great or small; 
A reasoning, self-sufficient thing, 
An intellectual all-in-all." 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 91 

It may be thought by some that faith was 
well enough for men who lived in the early ages 
of simplicity, and when rigid investigation is sup- 
posed to have been almost unknown. It is a mat- 
ter of fact, however, that the human mind is so 
intensely active, by creation and nature, that it 
has always been given to investigation. The field 
of investigation, it is true, has varied with the 
progress of ages. Modern investigation would be 
hampered almost beyond remedy if deprived of 
the rich inheritance which has come down from 
antiquity. In truth, the human mind has been in 
volcanic action through all the ages. It is of the 
very nature of the mind to investigate and to 
weigh evidence. But it is quite a common feeling 
that modern research far transcends that which 
marked ages past. Let that be so. Can a modern 
scientific mind find a sufficient scientific base for 
faith? Can the modern man who thinks with pen- 
etration and with discrimination find the exact 
atom with which faith has a chemical affinity? 
When the scientific investigator has gone to the 
last milepost of that which is known, has the soul 
left to it any resource by which it may leap over 
into that which is unknown, and carry the assur- 
ance of truth with the leap? Can the highly edu- 
cated man, by any possible psychic reserve, bridge 
the chasm between matter and spirit, between 
matter and God? Is it necessary that culture and 
faith should be divorced? Is it necessary that the 
educated classes of society should drift into skept- 
icism and thence into irreligion? Is it necessary 
that the college should become the foe of faith ? 
Is there any good reason why Learning should 
look askance at Faith? Does not faith have a 
place in all true Science? Is not even science un- 



92 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

der the necessity of trusting its conclusions and 
exercising faith in them? Faith is a working fac- 
tor in the development of all true knowledge, an 
atomic particle found in the basic elements of 
truth, and the chemist must not ignore it. To ig- 
nore this one atom of faith is to vitiate the whole 
chemistry of truth. 

The Rev. Dr. J. B. Mozley, late Canon of 
Christ Church, and Regius Professor of Divinity 
in Oxford University, has a paragraph in one of 
his Bampton Lectures, which states the case most 
admirably for the careful student of faith. "We 
frequently see persons who," says Dr. Mozley, 
"when they are in possession of the best argu- 
ments, and, what is more, understand those argu- 
ments, are still shaken by almost any opposition, 
because they want the faculty to trust an argu- 
ment, when they have got one; which is not the 
case with others who can both understand and 
trust too; wherein we see the link which connects 
faith with self-confidence and strength of will. 
In religion, then, where conclusions are so totally 
removed from the type of custom, and are so vast 
and stupendous, this applies the more strongly, 
but in truth, all untried conclusions need faith, 
whatever strong arguments there may be for 
them. When a scientific man sees various pre- 
mises conspiring to direct him to some new truth 
or law of nature, the aptness with which these co- 
incide and fall in with each other may amount to 
such strong evidence, that he may feel virtually 
certain of his discovery, and yet he does not feel it 
quite secure till it has stood the test of some crown- 
ing experiment. His reason, then, in the interim, is 
faith, he trusts his premises, he feels practically 
sure that they cannot mislead him, he sees in their 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 93 

whole mode of combining and concurring a warrant 
for the issue, although the final criterion is still in 
prospect. Such a condition of mind is analogous 
to that of the religious believer, who perceives in 
nature, moral and physical, the strongest argu- 
ments for certain religious conculsions— such as 
the existence of God, and a future life; and yet 
waits for that final certification of these great 
truths, which will be given in another world. 
Tor we are saved by hope, but hope that is seen 
is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he 
yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, 
then do we with patience wait for it\ Faith, 
then, is un verified reason; reason which has not 
yet received the verification or the final test, but 
is still expectant.' ' 



94 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"The sovereign people must not be sovereignless, but their only possi- 
ble Sovereign is the God who is the Lord of the conscience. His is the only 
voice that can still the noise of the passions and the tumult of the interests." 
—Dr. A. M. Fairbairn. 

"Any social order must stand in some veritable connection with the 
higher law of heaven. If it would be true and permanent, it must recog- 
nize the presence and power of the living God."— A. Scott Matheson. 

"Divest reason of its trust, and the universe stops at the impersonal 
stage— there is no God. And yet if the first step in religion is the greatest, 
how is it that the freest and boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is 
it that the most mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What 
is it which guards this truth? What is it which makes men shrink from 
denying it? Why is atheism a crime? Is it that authority still reigns upon 
one question, and that the voice of all ages is too potent to be withstood?"— 
Canon Mozley. 

"This then is the message which we have heard of Him, and declare 
unto you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all."— St. John. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 95 



SECTION X. 



CONSERVATION OF FAITH IN GOD. 

Faith in a personal God is one of the essential 
elements of character, and without such a faith 
character perishes away just as a tree dies when 
the roots are removed. The pleasing speculations 
of many ancient philosophers with reference to an 
abstract, pantheistic Deity were never designed to 
reach moral conduct. These speculations were in 
no way intended to lead men to better lives. They 
were entirely foreign to daily conduct and hence 
their failure to meet the needs of men. Faith in a 
personal God, however, leads men to worship God, 
and the worship of an infinitely holy and righteous 
God lifts moral conduct to the highest possible 
standard. The worshipping soul becomes trans- 
formed into the image of God, purified by faith 
and distinguished by rectitude in thought, word, 
and deed. This faith in a personal God has a ba- 
sis in reason and it has a foundation in our insti- 
tutions. The mind which has been trained in 
mathematics and the exact sciences becomes ac- 
customed to logical form as its only instrument by 
which truth may be discovered. Such a mind as- 
sumes a permanent logical cast and all truth must 
be ground out in this logical mill. This logical 



96 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

cast of mind, which is a good thing within certain 
limits, is liable to become a final infirmity, because 
logical form is not the only means by which the 
soul obtains knowledge. To such a logical mind it 
is a marvel that the Bible does not undertake to 
prove the existence of a personal God. In fact, 
there are so many reasons for believing in a per- 
sonal God that faith assumes as much. The Bible 
does not resort to argument to prove the exist- 
ence of God, because the Bible is a book of sense, 
and not a book of needless speculations. 

The considerations given above explain to 
some extent at least the attitude of Huxley who 
said in one of his Lay Sermons that faith has been 
proved a 'cardinal sin' by science. Science has 
done much to clear away credulity and supersti- 
tion, but these are not to be confounded with faith 
in a personal God to whom I am to give an account 
for the deeds of my life. And while even Herbert 
Spencer, following the scientific method, reached 
the Unknown and Unknowable, his Unknown and 
Unknowable was such only to the logical man, the 
fractional man, and not to the whole man. 
Faith is called the sixth sense and this sixth 
sense the distinguished scientist did not use. 
Canon Gore justly remarks: ' 'Scientific ratiocina- 
tion cannot find adequate grounds for belief in 
God. But the pure agnostic must recognize that 
God may have revealed Himself by other means 
than that of scientific ratiocination. As religion 
is for the whole man, so all human faculties may 
be required to seek after God and find Him— emo- 
tions and experiences of an extra— 'rational' kind. 
The 'pure agnostic' must be prepared to welcome 
evidence of all sorts.' ' George John Romanes 
who gave himself exclusively to scientific investi- 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 97 

gation in his earlier years, and thereby put an un- 
due limit on his psychic powers, makes this dis- 
criminating statement with reference to the place 
of reason in the soul: ' 'Reason is not the only at- 
tribute of man, nor is it the only faculty which he 
habitually employs for the ascertainment of truth. 
Moral and spiritual faculties are of no less impor- 
tance in their respective spheres even of every day 
life; faith, trust, and taste areas needful in ascer- 
taining truth as to character and beauty, as is rea- 
son. Indeed we may take it that reason is con- 
cerned in ascertaining truth only where causation 
is concerned; the appropriate organs for its ascer- 
tainment where anything else is concerned belong 
to the moral and spiritual region.' ' It is not the 
easiest thing, however, for the mind trained in 
scientific method to discover its own other powers 
and trust in their conclusions, as well as in the 
conclusions of reason. "Perhaps the hardest of 
these sacrifices," says Romanes again, "to an in- 
telligent man is that of his own intellect. At least 
I am certain that this is so in my own ease. I have 
been so long accustomed to constitute my reason 
my sole judge of truth, that even while reason it- 
self tells me it is not unreasonable to expect that 
the heart and the will should be required to join 
with reason in seeking God (for religion is for the 
whole man), I am too jealous of my reason to exer- 
cise my will in the direction of my most heart-felt 
desires. For assuredly the strongest desire of my 
nature is to find that that nature is not deceived in 
its highest aspirations. ' ' 

Strange as it may appear, the exercise of pure 
reason is only a small factor in determining relig- 
ious belief in God. Religious belief flourishes 
among all classes, and even among those who have 



98 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

spent their lives in the pursuit of the most exact 
studies. "Thus, if we look to the greatest mathe- 
maticians in the world's history," Romanes de- 
clares, "we find Kepler and Newton as Christians; 
La Place, on the other hand, an infidel. Or, com- 
ing to our own times, and confining our attention 
to the principal seat of mathematical study: — 
when I was at Cambridge, there was a galaxy of 
genius in that deportment emanating from that 
place such as had never before been equalled. 
And the curious thing in our present connection is 
that all the most illustrious names were ranged on 
the side of orthodoxy. Sir W. Thompson, Sir 
George Stokes, Professor Tait, Adams, Clerk-Max- 
well, and Cayley— not to mention a number of 
lesser lights, such as Routh, Todhunter, and Fer- 
rers—were all avowed Christians. It would doubt- 
less be easy to find elsewhere than in Cambridge 
mathematicians of the first order who in our own 
generations are, or have been, professedly anti- 
Christian in (heir beliefs— although certainly not 
so great an array of such extraordinary powers. 
But, be this as it may, the case of Cambridge in 
my own time seems to me of itself enough to prove 
that Christian belief is neither made or marred by 
the highest powers of reasoning, apart from other 
and still more potent factors.' ' 

It may have been necessary for M. Comte to 
have thought out his system of Positive Philoso- 
phy, but it has never been necessary for the world 
to think out the truth of a personal God. "To the 
Jews," says Dr. R. W. Dale, "Jehovah was not a 
mere idea or a system of attributes. They did not 
think of Him as the Necessary Cause of the Uni- 
verse, or as a Being inacessible to human knowl- 
edge, but Whom it was their duty to invest with 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 99 

whatever perfections could exalt and glorify Him 
—infinite Wisdom, infinite Power, awful Right- 
eousness, inflexible Truth, the tenderest Love. It 
never occurred to them to suppose that they had 
to think out a God for themselves any more than it 
occurred to them that they had to think out a King 
of Egypt. They knew Pharaoh as a tyrannical 
sovereign from whom they had suffered intolerable 
oppression, and who had been drowned for his 
crimes in the Red Sea. They knew Jehovah as 
the God who had held back the waves like a wall 
while they fled across the sea to escape the ven- 
geance of their enemies; they knew Him as the 
God who had sent thunder, and lightning, and hail, 
plagues on cattle, and plagues on men, to punish 
the Egyptians and to compel them to let the chil- 
dren of Israel go; they knew Him as the God 
whose angel had slain the firstborn of their op- 
pressors, and filled the land from end to end with 
death, and agnoy, and terror. He was the same 
God, so Moses and Aaron told them, who by vis- 
ions and voices, in promises and precepts, had re- 
vealed Himself long before to Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob." This faith in God linked the whole Jew- 
ish nation, and since then the whole world, to duty 
and to the highest standard of right living. When 
moral character and conduct are involved idle 
speculations do not serve our highest needs. Dr. 
Joseph Parker suggests that a moral Laplander, 
frozen with logical icicles, could hardly understand 
the luxuriant tropics, and fruitful of that glorious 
faith which believes in God the Father of all and 
merciful toward all His children. Even the warm- 
er and more poetic philosopher has helped to neu- 
tralize this strong Hebrew faith in a personal God. 
1 'However noble,' ' writes Canon Farrar, "may 



100 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

have been the lives of Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, 
Schelling, Hegel, and their lives were very noble; 
however sincerely they may have claimed— and 
most of them did claim— the position of humble 
Christians and religious philosophers; however 
magnificently they may have asserted— and some 
of them did assert with unequalled force— the maj- 
esty of the moral law within; above all, however 
little it may be fitting for us to pass judgment up- 
on men so good and wise, with intolerant bigotry 
or austere condemnation,— yet certainly the total 
effect of their speculations was to idealize, say 
rather, to evaporate the facts of Christianity, —to 
substitute the supposed intuitions of a natural for 
the firm truths of a revealed religion. In their 
hands the simple faith in Christ was sublimated 
into a mere religious Theosophy, and the doctrine 
of His divinity furtively relegated from the light 
of history into a misty region of intellectual sub- 
tleties." 

Faith when properly presented comes with au- 
thority, and not in the apologetic tone. Faith has 
assurance, as well as reason, and this assurance of 
faith should be asserted in the strongest terms. 
In his introduction to his first Hulsean Lecture 
Canon Farrar gives expression to the proper atti- 
tude of the ministry touching faith and its open 
profession: "He, my brethren, who having been 
ordained to the ministry of the word, stands up to 
preach the gospel which his Master taught, ought 
to do so on all occasions with as little fear or mis- 
giving as an ambassador in delivering the message 
of a king. If he be telling of that which by Faith 
he has heard and seen, and his hands have hand- 
led of the Word of Life— if he not only believe in 
his utmost soul the truths he utters, but would be 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 101 

ready, if need were, to die for them— then his 
heart should not beat one throb faster, though, 
like the Apostles of old, he were standing before 
Philosophers at Athens or Emperors at Rome." 

In like manner the man who would conserve 
faith in a personal God will not deny his faith in 
the miraculous. Admit that God is, and belief in 
miracles is perfectly logical. To be strictly logi- 
cal it is only the Atheist who can withhold faith 
from miracles. Faith in God is reasonable, and 
faith in miracles is also reasonable. On a matter 
of such great moment let us weigh the words of 
Canon Mozley, who says: "The conception of a 
limited Deity then, i.e., a Being really circumscrib- 
ed in power, and not verbally only by a confine- 
ment to necessary truth, is at variance with our 
fundamental idea of God; to depart from which is 
to retrograde from 'modern thought to ancient, 
and to go from Christianity back to Paganism. 
The God of ancient religion was either not a per- 
sonal Being or not an omnipotent Being; the God 
of modern religion is both. For, indeed, civiliza- 
tion is not opposed to faith. The idea of the Su- 
preme Being in the mind of European society now 
is more primitive, more childlike, more imagina- 
tive, than the idea of the ancient Brahman or 
Alexandrian philosopher; it is an idea which both 
of these would have derided as the notion of a 
child— a negotiosus Devs, who interposes in human 
affairs and answers prayers. Certain ages are in- 
deed called the ages of faith ; but the bulk of so- 
ciety in this age believes that it lives under a su- 
pernatural dispensation. Has not modern philoso- 
phy, again, shown both more strength and acute- 
ness, and also more faith, than the ancient? If 
the belief then in a personal Deity lies at the bot- 



102 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

torn of all religious and virtuous practice, and if 
the removal of it would be a descent for human 
nature, the withdrawal of its inspiration and sup- 
port, and a fall in its whole standard; the failure 
of the very breath of moral life in the individual 
and in society; the decay and degeneration of the 
very stock of mankind;— does a theory which 
would withdraw miraculous action from the Deity 
interfere with that belief? If it would, it is but 
prudent to count the cost of that interference. 
Would a Deity deprived of miraculous action pos- 
ess action at all? And would a God who cannot 
act be God? If this would be the issue, such an 
issue is the very last which religious men can de- 
sire. The question here has been all throughout, 
not whether upon any ground, but whether upon a 
religious ground and by religious believers, the 
miraculous as such could be rejected. But to that 
there is but one answer, that it is impossible in 
reason to separate religion from the supernatural, 
and upon a religious basis to overthrow miracles.' 9 
In conserving faith in God we also conserve 
faith in the Bible, which is God's revelation of 
Himself and of His thoughts to men. An age of 
investigation and critical study has, of course, in- 
vestigated the Bible. Critical scholarship and 
open infidelity have alike made their assaults on 
the Book, and the Book stands unshaken. Rev. 0. 
B. Frothingham was known to have some aversion 
to orthodoxy as it was known in his day, but he 
has given us one of the very best final conclusions 
concerning the reliability of the religion which is 
unfolded in the Bible. "The lesson of all this,' ' 
says Dr. Frothingham, "is the absolute distinction 
between investigation into the natural genesis or 
the historical development of instituted forms, 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 103 

whether of observance or belief, and the principles 
of religious trust. Push criticism to its farthest 
point, still there is a line it cannot pass over. 
Give real scholarship its rein in the study of the 
Old Testament; in the study of the New Testa- 
ment; in the attempt to find the causes of obser- 
vance, doctrine, church; in the effort to account 
for the selection of canonical writings; in the en- 
deavor to explain the life of Jesus; demand of it 
acuteness, perseverance, frankness; make its diffi- 
cult task as easy as readiness to accept results can 
make it. Its tether is short enough at best, for 
the validity of spiritual truth is beyond the reach 
of its sharpest instruments, and whatever results 
may be arrived at, faith can have nothing to fear. 
Suppose every miracle to be discredited; suppose 
doubt to be thrown on the whole legend of the 
Gospels; suppose the theory advanced in Christ 
the Spirit, namely, that the story of Jesus is myth- 
ical, to be demonstrated as far as it can be, still 
the religion is untouched. Neither the Trinity, 
nor the Deity of Christ, nor the virtue of the 
Eucharist, nor the reality of an Eternal Life, rests 
on the Bible; if they did, they would never have 
existed at all. This has been said a great many 
times, and should be a commonplace idea now. 
Yet there are critics who fancy that criticism will 
destroy Christianity, and there are Christians who 
fear that the critics will take away their birth- 
right. It is no matter for surprise that believers 
should take up arms in defense of favorite books or 
characters, for it is not human to surrender with- 
out a struggle what one loves; but it is astonishing 
that thinking men of this generation should feel 
that their defeat imperiled the citadel of faith." 
The conservation of faith is further necessary 



104 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

because it leads to the salvation of the soul from 
sin. In the use of saving faith in the Lord Jesus 
Christ our sins are all forgiven, and we have peace 
with God. It is in this region that faith reaches 
its supremest height, and accomplishes its 
greatest good. The faith that leads to sonship 
in the family of God enriches the soul beyond all 
expression. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews 
shows what faith has done for men who jeopardiz- 
ed their lives for the truth. With them faith be- 
came the very iron of the soul, and gave them 
strength for the fiercest temptations. What hath 
not faith wrought in the world? Was mankind 
ever blessed with a richer endowment than that 
which has come by faith? To give up thy faith is 
to give up the riches of spiritual treasures, and 
precious above rubies. St. John gives the very 
highest place to faith in the practical life of a true 
child of God. He links faith with victory, one of 
the greatest victories ever won on the field of bat- 
tle. The man whose soul went out into love and 
faith wrote these words: "This is the victory that 
overcometh the world, even your faith. Who is he 
that overcometh 'the world, but he that believeth 
that Jesus is the Son of God?" 



106 CONSERVATION OP THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"The conscience is the servant only of God, and it is not subject to the 
will of men. Through His words, this truth, which reaches to social as well 
as religious institutions, has an indestructible life. If it be crucified it will 
rise again. If buried in the sepulchre the stone will be rolled away, and the 
keepers become as dead men."— Dr. Francis W. Upham. 

"Fortune does not side with the despondent."— Sophocles. 

"Let us believe that Right makes might, and in that faith let us to the 
end dare to do our duty as we understand it."— President Lincoln. 

"He always wins who sides with God; 
With Him no chance is lost."— Faber. 

"But Virtue's treasures are alone secure."— Sophocles. 

"And every man that hath this Hope in him purifieth himself, even as 
He is pure."— St. John. 

"No falsehood lingers on into old age."— Sophocles. 

"For look again on the past years;— behold, 

Flown, like the nightmare's hideous shapes, away, 

Full many a horrible worship, that, of old, 

Held, o'er the shuddering realms, unquestioned sway: 

See crimes that feared not once the eye of day, 

Rooted from men, without a name or place; 

See nations blotted out from earth, to pay 

The forfeit of deep guilt:— with glad embrace 

The fair disburdened lands welcome a nobler race." 

— Willian Cullen Bryant. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 107 



SECTION XL 



Conservation of the Faith That Believes in t he 

Final Overthrow of Evil. 

He who believes in a personal God, infinitely 
Righteous and Omnipotent, lis in a position to believe 
that some day Evil will meet its doom. He who 
believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, whose Love is 
deathless, and whose Atonement for sin has been 
made, is fortified in the faith which believes that 
Infinite Love, some day, will triumph over Evil. 
He who believes in the personality of the Holy 
Spirit, the executive of the Godhead and the One 
who regenerates the human heart, is further justi- 
fied in believing that the day is coming when Evil 
will be finally overthrown. He who believes in 
the Bible as the Revelation of God to men discerns 
the rays of light in the early dawn which are a 
sure foretoken of the glorious coming day when 
Righteousness shall reign and Evil shall be ban- 
ished. He who believes in Progress, regardless of 
religious faith, must believe in the passing away of 
old conditions, and the incoming of better things- 
He who believes that Man has not as yet attained 
to his highest development and achievements must 
believe that in future he will more and more dis- 
card the Evil which retards the growth of his 
highest powers. He who believes that History 



108 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

reveals the progress of the human race believes 
also in the future progress of the race of mankind 
even till Evil shall not share with God a place in 
the Universe. There are sane and substantial rea- 
sons for conserving this faith which believes in 
the final overthrow of Evil, and a few of these 
reasons are here presented. 

St. John thinks of God as light and says of 
Him, ' 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at 
all." Let us think for a moment what this state- 
ment involves. God, the greatest truth in the 
great universe, is in essence and being, light and 
righteousness, and this means that light and right- 
eousness are by far the greatest facts in heaven 
and earth. Light and righteousness are infinitely 
great and potent. By the very nature of God, 
righteousness is in an infinite majority. Shadows 
and darkness are the momentary incidents of the 
presence of light, and shadows never have project- 
ed themselves very far out into God's universe. 
Even those projected shadows are transfused and 
softened with light. Light and goodness are uni- 
versal, while shadows and wickedness are limited. 
Sin and death have cast their dark shadows into 
our homes, and tears of sorrow have moistened our 
eyes, and wickedness has wrought destruction all 
about us, and the blackness of night and despair 
have enveloped us; but into all these things the 
light of redeeming love has come with blessings 
and benedictions. These sad things are the shad- 
ows of the night, and sometimes they make an aw- 
ful night, black with storms and death, but when 
the day dawns there stands the Sun of Righteous- 
ness to receive even the spirits of our beloved dead 
into his loving arms, to sin and suffer no more 
while heaven stands. There is a faith that walks 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 109 

with sorrow, and hastening its steps, leaves sor- 
row far behind. There is a faith which meets with 
sin in the way of life, and which firmly refuses to 
enter into companionship with sin, and walk with 
it. There is a faith which, when sin has assaulted 
it and left it for dead on the roadside, rises again 
and takes shelter in the inn of God's infinite mer- 
cies. There is a faith which grapples even with 
death, and when death has conquered, this faith 
with all the glories of the resurrection adorning it, 
exclaims, "0 death, where is thy sting? grave, 
where is thy victory ?" There is a faith which, 
anchored in God, cannot be driven by any tempest, 
into a hopeless view of life. This faith believes 
that evil, however deeply intrenched and wide- 
spread, is in the minority and on the losing side. 
This faith believes that light is triumphant and 
that darkness is doomed. 

He who would conserve his faith in the final 
overthrow of evil may also direct his thought to 
this one particular fact, that the structure and 
fiber of evil are not of a permanent character. 
The house built on the sand could serve only a 
temporary purpose, because it had a very imper- 
fect foundation. The garment made of wool or 
cotton fiber is doomed to decay, because a law of 
nature dooms these fibers to disintegration. There 
is no life in such a texture to preserve it and make 
it live; it must perish in time. Error and evil meet 
with great storms and, lacking truth for a founda- 
tion, they go down in the tempest. Idolatry, for 
instance, has always been a widespread evil, and 
it has always lacked truth for a foundation. So 
idolatry was doomed by Jehovah among the Jews. 
The great storm of truth overturned the house of 
error and evil, and idolatry went to its doom 



110 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

among the Jews. In so far as Greek and Roman 
philosophers began to perceive the truth, they 
openly ridiculed the idol gods worshiped by the 
people, and Christianity has seen thousands of 
these gods perish. Every god of heathenism 
in our day is doomed to die, because his worship 
is not founded on truth. Truth stands eternal, 
but evil falls in its presence. Let every mission- 
ary laboring among pagans renew his faith as he 
thinks of these things. Let him conserve his faith 
in the final destruction of all these idols. Let 
every preacher of the Gospel, toiling and laboring 
often against great odds, wickedness sometimes 
within the flock, and evil fortified in social life; let 
the preacher of the glorious Gospel never forget 
that evil dooms itself, because it is not supported 
by truth. Likewise the texture and fabric of some 
fine false theory is subjected to the acid of truth, 
and when truth begins to eat as an acid the texture 
finally falls to pieces. Truth as an acid searches 
out and destroys the last fiber of error. All false 
sciences fall to pieces when truth touches them. 
See what Socrates did for the Sophists among 
the Greeks. See how Plato continued the same 
discriminating thought. See how truth wrought 
with these men in the destruction of false philoso- 
phies. Evil goes with wireless rapidity, to be sure, 
but truth comes into harbor later with her price- 
less cargo. In our day nearly every species of 
error is being promulgated by distilling and brew- 
ing interests touching Temperance Reform. These 
interests are turning virtue into vice, and vice into 
virtue. Crime against private life is considered a 
public good. That which despoils the individual 
is taught to be a public benefaction. That which 
impoverishes a family, we are led to believe, 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 111 

enriches a nation. Alcohol as a poison, they 
would persuade us, adds immensely to health. 
It is the poor man's duty, remember, to add 
to the riches of the brewer. Germany has 
become great, claims our moist friend, as she 
has become besotted. Good pastors, we are 
reminded, are friends to the traffic, and all the 
leading newspapers are for the business. Never 
mind. In this case true science and genuine re- 
ligion hold the truth firmly against all comers. 
This acid of truth is eating into this liquor fabric, 
and although this fabric is supported by appetite 
and financial interests, the day is coming; possibly 
not in my day, but the day is coming when the 
majesty of truth shall stand supreme in this pres- 
ent great realm of error. Let us conserve our 
faith in the final overthrow of evil, because the 
foundation of evil is doomed to give away, and be- 
cause the fabric of evil is doomed to decay. 

He who would further conserve his faith in the 
ultimate overthrow of evil would do well to examine 
carefully the nature of righteousness. The cells 
of life make up the structure of righteousness, 
and this fact makes righteousness a thing of life and 
growth. Righteousness builds from within and 
grows outwardly, cell added to cell, till even the 
small grain of mustard seed becomes a great tree. 
Life is self-perpetuating, and while it may be ex- 
tinguished in one place, it is sure to break out in 
another place. Even death has never finally con- 
quered life, and it never will. As righteousness 
partakes of the nature of life so, in just so far, 
does righteousness partake of that which is death- 
less and eternal. Righteousness is based on right, 
and right is immortal and eternal. St. John in 
discussing righteousness in his first Letter refers 



112 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

to it as a seed that remaineth. Isaiah was dis- 
tinguished in his day for his doctrine of the rem- 
nant of the righteousness which always remained 
after wickedness had wrought its greatest destruc- 
tion. This doctrine of the remnant is historically 
true, and a few of the righteous were always 
found among the Jews in Old Testament days. 
That remnant persisted through all the Dark Ages, 
and it holds good to this day. The seed of right- 
eousness has sent its roots down even into the 
rocks and burst them asunder. Do not despise 
even the little twig a few inches in height; it has 
in it life, and that life will be vastly greater at the 
end of a hundred years. Faith in righteousness is 
linked to life, and that means a faith that will not 
perish. Faith feeds on the roots of life, and its 
fruitage will not fail. 

He who would conserve his faith in the final 
overthrow of evil may even dare to appeal to Rom- 
an history. It is well known to all who have stud- 
ied the Bible that Christ did not come till the ful- 
ness of time, and that was when the Roman Em- 
pire had come to its greatest splendor and glory. 
It is the record of history that evil of every kind 
permeated and dominated the Roman Empire at 
the time of Augustus and Tiberius and their im- 
mediate successors. The throne of the Empire 
was the throne of evil, and a throne that apparent- 
ly could never be shaken even till the end of time. 
Evil was so thoroughly interwoven with all social 
and national life that the stoutest hearts pulsated 
in despair. Tacitus, who made a thorough study 
of the age of Tiberius, is a competent witness and 
he says: "The government thus overthrown, 
nothing remained of ancient manners, or ancient 
spirit. Of independence, or the equal condition 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 113 

of Roman citizens, no trace was left. All ranks 
submitted to the will of the prince, little solicitous 
about the present hour; while Augustus, in the 
vigor of health, maintained at once his own dig- 
nity, the honor of his house, and the public tran- 
quility. In process of time, when worn with age 
and failing under bodily infirmities, he seemed to 
approach the last act, a new scene presented itself 
to the hopes of men. Some amused themselves 
with the ideas of ancient liberty, many dreaded 
the horrors of civil war, and others wished for 
public commotion; the greater part discussed, with 
a variety of opinions, the character of the new 
masters at that moment impending over the state. 
'Agrippa was rude and savage; disgrace added to 
his natural ferocity; and, in point of age and ex- 
perience, he was by no means equal to the weight 
of Empire. Tiberius was matured by years; he 
had gained reputation in war; but the pride of the 
Claudian family was inveterate in his nature, and 
his inbred cruelty, however suppressed with art, 
announced itself in various shapes. Trained up 
in the imperial house, in the very bosom of despot- 
ism, he had been inured from his youth to the 
pomp and pride of consulships and triumphs. 
During the years which he passed in a seeming re- 
treat, but real exile, in the isle of Rhodes, he med- 
itated nothing so much as plans of future ven- 
geance, clandestine pleasures, and the arts of dis- 
simulation *' To these reflections the public added 
their dread of a mother raging with all the impo- 
tence of female ambition; a whole people, they 
said, were to be enslaved by a woman, and two 
young men, who in the beginning would hang 
heavy on the State, and in the end distract and 
rend it to pieces by their own dissensions." This 



114 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

was the beginning of evil days in the Empire and 
for a hundred years conditions grew worse. The 
Christian religion had not gone far into the Em- 
pire till it met with evils of the most appalling 
character. "After the battle of Actium," says 
Tacitus, "when, to close the scene of evil distrac- 
tion, all power and authority were surrendered to 
a single ruler, the historic character disappeared, 
and genius died by the same blow that ended pub- 
lic liberty. Truth was reduced to the last gasp, 
and various circumstances conspired against her. 
A new constitution took place, undefined, and lit- 
tle understood. Men resigned their rights, and 
lived like aliens in their native country. Adula- 
tion began to spread her baleful influence, and a 
rooted hatred of their ambitious masters rankled 
in the breast of numbers." ' 

Even the Christian religion, the most pure and 
holy of all religions, was esteemed by Tacitus as 
nothing better than a vile superstition. Other 
writers and thinkers of his day held Christianity 
in the same contempt. To us, in our day, it does 
indeed seem strange that a man so brilliant as Tac- 
itus could hold Christianity in such contempt. It 
is in connection with the burning of Rome by 
Nero that he gives us his idea of the Christian re- 
ligion. "The infamy of that horrible transaction, 
says Tacitus, "still adhered to him. In order, if 
possible, to remove the imputation, he determined 
to transfer the guilt to others. For this purpose 
he punished, with exquisite torture, a race of men 
detested for their evil practices, by vulgar appel- 
lation commonly called Christians. The name was 
derived from Christ, who in the reign of Tiberius, 
suffered under Pontius Pilate, the procurator of 
Judaea. By that event the sect, of which he was 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 115 

the founder, received a blow, which for a time, 
checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; 
but it revived soon after, and spread with recruit- 
ed vigor, not only in Judaea, the soil that gave it 
birth, but even in the city of Rome, the common 
sink into which everything infamous and abomina- 
ble flows like a torrent from all quarters of the 
world.' ' This estimate of the glorious Gospel 
comes from an eminent Roman historian who 
wrote about one hundred years after the birth of 
Christ. Nero, the incarnation of evil, was hurling 
death at the Church, and later Tacitus, acute and 
philosophic, poured contempt upon the truth. 
When these conditions pervaded the whole Empire 
how could evil ever possibly be dethroned? Could 
any place be found for faith in the overthrow of 
such gigantic evils, buttressed and fortified by 
both philosophy and Empire? Under such condi- 
tions would faith be folly? Can a ray of light ever 
penetrate this blackness of darkness? Can a blaz- 
ing sun ever drive back this appalling night? Can 
the Kingdom of God shake the foundations of 
Hell? Can the Almighty bind Satan in chains and 
hurl him into the bottomless pit? Can faith cling 
to the pillars of Heaven while evil makes the very 
earth tremble? Can the missionary of our day 
maintain his faith in the final overthrow of pagan- 
ism, when paganism is enthroned all about him? 
Can the worker for civic righteousness cherish an 
abiding faith as he toils in the midst of political 
corruption at almost every turn? Can it be a ra- 
tional faith that believes in the redemption of our 
modern cities? Let us see. 

St. Paul and the early Christians at Rome 
held the faith triumphant, the faith that evil could 



116 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

not overpower. The faith of the Disciples at 
Eome was one of their most distinguishing traits. 
St. Paul bears this testimony to their victorious 
faith, the faith that scaled all the heights of evil 
in the Roman Empire: "I thank my God through 
Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken 
of throughout the whole world." In substance 
St. Paul said to the Roman Empire, a great gigan- 
tic system of evil: "I have a message of Truth 
for the Greeks who love intelligence and for the 
Barbarians who are densely ignorant. My mes- 
sage is for your most acute intellects as well as for 
the men of average mind." His faith in the pow- 
er of the truth over all evil emboldens him to say, 
"I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it 
is the power of God unto salvation to every one 
that belie veth." 

Have you ever studied faith as a dynamic? 
See what faith did for good men and women in the 
Roman Empire under Nero and some of his suc- 
cessors, for men "Who through faith subdued 
kingdoms, wrought righteousness, stopped the 
mouths of lions, quenched the violence of lire, es- 
caped the edge of the sword, out of weakness 
were made strong, waxed valient in fight, turn- 
ed to flight the armies of the aliens. Women re- 
ceived their dead raised to life again; and others 
were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they 
might obtain a better resurrection. And others 
had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, 
moreover of bonds and imprisonment. They were 
stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, 
were slain with the sword; they wandered about in 
sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, 
tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy.) 
They wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 117 

in dens and caves of the earth. And these all hav- 
ing obtained a good report through faith/ ' 

St. John's faith was teloscopic in its sweep of 
the spiritual skies. He saw the highest heights 
of evil in the Roman world, but his faith never 
failed him as to the final doom of all those evils. 
He excells even Tacitus in characterizing the City 
of Rome, and the Empire. His first name for the 
imperial City is expressive of the hidden workings 
of evil, Mystery. Then he adds the name, Babylon 
The Great. Then he reaches his climax with the 
name, Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the 
Earth. St. John's faith saw the glory of the 
Caesars fade away when he exclaimed, "Babylon 
the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the 
habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul 
spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful 
bird." It is then that St. John narrates the par- 
able of all nations and cities which build on evil 
instead of righteousness. "For all nations," he 
writes, ' 'have drunk of the wine of the wrath of 
her fornication, and the kings of the earth have 
committed fornication with her, and the merchants 
of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance 
of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from 
heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that 
ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye re- 
ceive not of her plagues. For her sins have reach- 
ed unto heaven, and God hath remembered her ini- 
quities. Reward her even as she has rewarded you, 
and double unto her double according to her works; 
in the cup which she has filled fill to her double. 
How much she has glorified herself, and lived de- 
liciously, so much torment and sorrow give her; 
for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no 
widow, and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall 



118 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, 
and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with 
fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. 
And the kings of the earth, who have committed 
fornication and lived deliriously with her, shall be- 
wail her, and lament for her, when they shall see 
the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for the 
fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great 
city of Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour 
is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the 
earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no 
man buyeth their merchandise any more: the 
merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious 
stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and 
purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, 
and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner 
vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and 
iron, and marble, and cinnamon, and odours, and 
ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, 
and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, 
and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of 
men. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are 
departed from thee, and all things which were 
dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and 
thou shalt find them no more at all. The mer- 
chants of these things, which were made rich by 
her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her tor- 
ment, weeping and wailing, and saying, Alas, alas 
that great City, that was clothed in fine linen, and 
purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and 
precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour great 
riches is come to naught And every shipmaster, 
and all the company of ships, and sailors, and as 
many as trade by sea, stood afar off, and cried 
when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, 
What city is like unto this great City! And they 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 119 

cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and 
wailing, saying Alas, alas that great City, wherein 
were made rich all that had ships in the sea by 
reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made 
desolate. Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye 
holy apostles and prophets; for God hath avenged 
you on her. And a mighty angel took up a stone 
like a great millstone, and cast it into the sea, say- 
ing, Thus with violence shall that great City Baby- 
lon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at 
all. And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and 
of pipers, and trumpeters, shall be heard no more 
at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever 
craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and 
the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at 
all in thee; and the light of a candle shall shine no 
more at all in thee; and the voice of the bride- 
groom and of the bride shall be heard no more at 
all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men 
of the earth; for by sorceries were all nations de- 
ceived. And in her was found the blood of pro- 
phets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon 
the earth." 

"The Niobeof nations! there she stands, 
Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe: 
An empty urn within her wither'd hands." 

St. John's faith was triumphant even in this 
great Armageddon where all the powers of evil 
were in battle array against the forces of right- 
eousness and truth. St John's faith in the final 
overthrow of evil finally blended with the jubilant 
voices of Heaven, and from Heaven came the last 
echo of that victorious faith, "Alleluia; Salvation, 
and glory, and honor, and power, unto the Lordi 
our God; for truth and righteousness are His judg- 
ments. Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent 
reignetb." 



120 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



"Good, to forgive; 

Best, to forget!**— Browning. 

"Act so as to treat humanity in thyself or any other as an end always, 
and never as a means only."— -Immanuel Kant. 

"Love— the deepest in its roots, the most diffusive in its influence, the 
most constraining in its action of any passion of the human soul."— Dr, 
James Chapman. 

"Sacrifice is the first element of religion, and resolves itself into the 
love of God. Let the thought of self intrude; let the painter but pause to 
consider how much reward his work will bring him, and the cunning will 
forsake his hand, and the power of genius will be gone. Excellence is pro- 
portioned to the oblivion of self."— Froude. 

"And of His fullness have we all received, and grace for grace."— St. 
John. 

"And, from that glad hour, 
Followed I Him, and ministered to Him; 
And found myself alive who had been dead. 
And saved by Love, who dwelt so lovelessly." 

- Sir Edwin Arnold. 

jl "In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all? 

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
That I doubt His own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift? 
Here, the creature surpass the Creator."— Browning. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 121 



SECTION XII. 



CONSERVATION OF CHRISTIAN LOVE. 

Conservation of Christian Love is conserva- 
tion of the most essential thing and the best thing 
in the Christian religion. Love to God and man is 
the one absolutely essential element in the religion 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the man who is not 
blessed with the gift of Love is less in the king- 
dom of God than he who has been endowed with 
the gift of faith. To believe in God is great, but 
to love God with the whole heart is much greater, 
and to love our fellow-men heartily is the complete 
exemplification of that love. This love is a strang- 
er to men of the world, and this love is so unnatur- 
al to the natural man that it may be called the im- 
possible gift. Christian love does not take its 
rise [in the soil of human nature; it finds its 
origin in God and comes into the hearts of men by 
way of the Cross of Christ, quickened and vitaliz- 
ed by the Holy Spirit. This is the birth of love,, 
and without this birth there is no essential Chris- 
tian character. When God implants the seed of 
heavenly love in the soul the growth of that seed 
is a miracle to the man who does not understand 
spiritual things. But God works wonders in the 
hearts of men as well as in nature; God implants 



122 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

the seed of love and great harvests of devotion 
and philanthropy appear among men. The heav- 
enly sowing enriches all the granaries of the 
world, and the famishing, perishing sons of men, 
out of their hunger and poverty, take up their jour- 
ney to the land of Goshen, the rich fields of the 
Gospel which flow with milk and honey. Living 
in the love of God is living on the fatness of the 
land, up to the knees in clover, and a June sun 
squandering largess of light all about us. Living 
in the love of God is a morning song, the tops of 
the trees burning in the early light, the soul a 
mocking bird, and angels listening to the trilling 
lay forget to sing. Living in the love of God is 
living up amid the stars of night, every star in the 
infinite bosom of love shedding a gentle ray of 
light to lighten the gloom of suffering and sin. To 
live in the love of God is the only way to live in 
the love of men. The music of heavenly love at- 
tunes all human voices for the redemption of men 
from misery and sin. It is only the brush dipped 
in God's love that spreads upon the canvass the 
form of the Suffering One who received the bap- 
tism of death that lost men might be redeemed 
from hell. It is only the chisel of God's love that 
cuts its way firmly, steadly, and truly into the 
marble of the human heart, hardened in sin, there- 
by revealing the new man. It is only the archi- 
tecture of God's love that goes down to the deep 
foundations of man's fallen nature, and builds up- 
ward the Gothic lines of man's redemption from 
sin, its high arches lifting him up to God. God is 
the builder of love and by divine love he builds 
and rebuilds man. In this divine husbandry of 
love ethics may have a place, but ethics without 
the pervading presence of God's love, are no more 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 123 

than chaff, soon blown by the four winds to naught. 

God's love in Christ Jesus enkindles God's love in 

the hearts of men, and love thus enkindled is to 

warm the world into salvation. God's love is the 

solvent, and the only solvent of all sin. God's love 

is the last great secret of the ages, and the Cross 

means the crucifixion and destruction of sin. God's 

love stands mountain high above reformation, good 

as reformation may be in its many forms. God's 

love is more eternal than the ages, and will abide 

long after the little pools of philanthrophy have 

evaporated into the skies. Philanthrophy without 

God's love in the heart of men to support it, is a 

pleasing dream of the night, and gone with the 

morning. 

The world's greatest dynamic is God's love 
in Christ Jesus, and we conserve it when we 
conserve proper views of its source. "It will 
be seen," says President Charles Cuthbert 
Hall, "by these reflections upon the ministry 
of the Apostles, that the dynamic of Chris- 
tianity was found originally in the Person of Christ 
and not originally in the eloquence of His sayings 
and the beneficence of His actions. The sayings 
and the actions took on their great significance be- 
cause of what He was in Himself, and as the ef- 
fulgence of the Father's glory, the express image 
of His substance ' Well did Whately say, 'Christ 
came not so much to make a revelation of truth by 
His own words, as to be a Revelation of Truth in 
His own Person. " And the Supreme Revelation 
of Christ was the revelation of love. Christian love 
lingers at the Cross and leaps into new life at the 
Resurrection, as Harnack truly says: "Whatever 
may have happened at the grave, one thing is cer- 
tain: this grave is the birthplace of the indestructi- 



124 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

ble belief that death is vanquished, that there is 
life eternal. Wherever there is a strong faith in 
the infinite value of the soul, wherever the suffer- 
ings of the present are measured against a future 
of glory, this feeling of life is bound up with the 
conviction that Jesus Christ has passed through 
death, that God has awakened and raised Him to 
life and glory. It is not any speculative ideas of 
philosophy, but by the vison of Jesus' Life and 
Death, and by the feeling of His imperishable 
union with God, that mankind, so far as it believes 
in these things, has attained to that certainty of 
eternal life it was meant to know and which it dim- 
ly discerns; eternal life in time and beyond time." 
The marvelous force of God's love is not found 
in the non-Christian faiths of the world, and we con- 
serve the true love of God by giving no place to The- 
osophy and such like movements. "The study of 
the philosophy and history of religion/ ' says Pres- 
ident Charles Cuthbert Hall, ' 'while it has dissolv- 
ed many prejudices, corrected many misrepresen- 
tations and brought to light many admirable facts 
touching the religious life of races beyond the con- 
fines of Christianity, has most clearly shown the 
point at which the great non-Christian faiths stop 
short of power for the throughgoing transforma- 
tion of character, which is salvation. They con- 
tain no central personality morally adequate to deal 
with the conscience, with the heart, with the will. 
They have no World-Saviour to offer. They are 
without the vitality that can give life to the soul 
dead in trespasses and sins. The more attentively 
we study them, estimating their fitness to minister 
to the religious needs of men, the more obvious be- 
comes their moral inadequacy. They have their 
heroes and their saints, their prophets and their 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 125 

sages, but they have no one to take the place of 
Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the World. They 
have no equivalent for His power to recreate the 
fundamental instincts and motives of the soul, to 
purge and reorganize the affections, to endue with 
the power of the spirit. The older religions are 
weakening because of moral inadequacy, and in 
their weakness are becoming corrupt; they are try- 
ing to arrest that process of corruption by assimi- 
lating the salt of the ethics of Jesus; while He, 
standing more conspicuously than ever, before the 
eyes of the whole races, the Desire of all nations, 
the Transformer of social ideals, the Regenerator 
of motives, the absolver from sin, is extending His 
influence and multiplying His triumphs as the Sa- 
viour of the World.' ' These old faiths are only 
broken lights and they help to reveal the beauties 
of Christian love which far surpasses them. It is 
Browning who says truly, 

Only the prism's obstruction shows aright 
The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light 
Into the jewelled bow from blankest white. 

St. John has an important word on the origin 
of God's love in the soul and its vital relation to 
the good of men. He writes: "Ye have an Unc- 
tion from the Holy One, and ye know all things.' ' 
"We know," he says again, "that we have passed 
from death unto life, because we love the breth- 
ren.' ' "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the 
Christ is born of God: and every one that loveth 
him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of 
him. By this we know that we love the children 
of God, when we love God." "But whoso hath 
this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, 
and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from 
him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?" "Let 



126 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

us not love in word, neither in tongue: but in deed 
and in truth." "Beloved, let us love one another: 
for love is of God; and every one that loveth is 
born of God, and knoweth God." "Look to your- 
selves, that we lose not those things which we 
have wrought, but that we receive a full reward." 

"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too— 
So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here! 
"Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 
"Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine: 
"But love I gave thee, with Myself to love." 

Another characteristic of God's love in the 
soul should be conserved more largely in our day 
than possibly at any previous time, and that is the 
universal compass of this love. Some important 
readjustments in our modern way of thinking are 
necessary to the larger love which is to be a mark 
of the future church. The conclusions of this 
larger love are somewhat surprising, but we must 
take these conclusions into our thinking, and act 
accordingly. ! 'Three things the Christianity of the 
West needs, " says President Charles Cuthbert Hall, 
"if it would be ready, in the day of the Lord, to 
meet and greet the next great interpretation of the 
churchly ideal. It needs the chastening of the 
Anglo-Saxon spirit; it needs to realize the democra- 
cy of nations; it needs to learn respect for Oriental 
national aims, and religious aspirations. The 
Anglo-Saxon spirit is rich in qualities that make 
for efficiency, it is capable of splendid exhibitions 
of physical and moral courage: it is also capable of 
presumption and provincialism. It is a haughty 
race-spirit, aggressive, given to threatening, in- 
clined to war, satisfied with itself, prone to intol- 
erance. The institutions of homogeneous peoples 
are impregnated with the national spirit, and, in 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 127 

some degree, exhibit it. Institutions of religion 
are no exception. The Christianity of a person, a 
household, a church or a nation tends to reflect 
the national spirit, alike in its strength and in its 
weakness. There are many ancestral qualities of 
Anglo-Saxonism that adorn the doctrine of God 
and commned it to the non-Christian world. Even 
some of its severer qualities have won the confi- 
dence and love of Orientals. Indians revered the 
inflexible manliness of Lord John Lawrence. But 
the besetting sin of Anglo-Saxonism in the East is 
arrogance that disdains what it conquers, and 
wounds when it essays to help. The unconscious 
reflection of that race spirit in some religious 
efforts of the West in the East has hardened hearts 
that might be won and widened chasms that might 
be bridged by substituting for the authority of 
Churchmanship and the irritating assumption of 
racial superiority, the perfect chivalry and cosmo- 
politanism of Him who was meek and lowly in 
heart. The democracv of nations is a truth that 
the West is slow of heart to believe. In the soul of 
the West lives a dream of a divine vocation of em- 
pire. It is a Roman inheritance. Through the in- 
spiration of that dream great results of good and 
evil have followed. The development of the re- 
sources of the world has been hastened. The 
spread of knowledge has been advanced. The con- 
ception of international relationships has been 
evolved. But respect for Oriental national aims 
and religious aspirations has had small place in 
Western thinking. The momentous condition of 
the world at this time indicates an approaching 
change. None may prophecy the nature of that 
change, but, if we believe in the present activity 
of the Spirit of God, we may look for great read- 



128 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

justments in Western thinking, for the chastening 
of inadmissible ambitions, and for the growing in- 
fluence of Christ in the East. Christ and Chris- 
tianity belong naturally to the East. Friction 
with the West has arrested the progress of a re- 
ligion that lends itself to all that is most brilliant 
in Oriental discernment and precious to Oriental 
sentiment. The readjustment of world relation- 
ships upon a basis of equity would be followed by 
the advance of Christianity among educated Asia- 
tics, and the growth of an Eastern Church of 
Christ. When we of the West broaden our con- 
ception of the Incarnation of the Son of God suffi- 
ciently to view it in its worldwide significance 
with eyes purged of racial prejudice and hearts 
from which all arrogance is put away, then shall 
we be prepared for the larger Church of Christ 
in which East and West are coequal and reciprocal. 
We shall realize the majesty, the cosmic greatness, 
the consolation and the joy of that larger Church. 
We shall see that that, and that alone, is an ideal 
of the Christian Church that measures up to the 
cosmopolitanism of Jesus Christ; that meets the 
greatness of His Incarnation and His Sacrifice, 
that satifies the travail of His soul, that crowns 
Him with many crowns. That larger Church of 
Christ, in her irenic completeness, shall assimilate 
with the ideals of a regenerated Orientalism what- 
soever is of the truth in the essence of all Western 
ideals— of England and America: of Germany and 
France and Switzerland; of Rome, of Constanti- 
nople, even of Jerusalem." 

This larger love of God must be devoutly con- 
served in forwarding the great work of Missions 
to all the peoples of the world. Touching this sub- 
ject Dr. Arthur T. Pierson says: "It is almost su- 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 129 

perfluous to say that the spirit of missions is the 
spirit of Love, for in Love it finds both its corner- 
stone and its cap-stone. But Love itself is a vir- 
tue and grace which few possess, or even under- 
stand. There are two kinds of love: one is that of 
complacence, finding pleasure in its object and 
evoked by the discovery of admirable and attractive 
traits. The other is the love of benevolence, which 
depends upon an inward impulse rather than an 
outward attraction. It is this latter sort of love 
which was not found in Greek philosophy. It was 
conceived as Jesus was, of the Holy Ghost, 
although, like Him, born of a regenerate humanity. 
It is not a personal affection, founded and ground- 
ed on moral esteem; for such love in the nature of 
things reaches only to those whom we personally 
know, and to comparatively few of them. The 
love to which we refer now is chanty, good will 
expressed in good deeds, whether to friend or foe, 
and extending even to those personally unknown. 
While complacent love is exclusive and intensive, 
this love is inclusive and extensive; it is uni- 
versal and impartial; and is not so much an 
affection as it is a principle, and so James calls it 
The Royal Law, ' or rule of life. Only as we un- 
derstand such love can we know the spirit of mis- 
sions. God loved us when we were enemies, and 
in this commends His love both to our gratitude 
and our imitation. We are to love as He loved, 
without respect to the character of the object, or 
any recompense even in kind. Nay, the more un- 
lovely and unlovable the object, the more will such 
love be drawn into excerise, for the greater is the 
debasement and need of the object, and therefore 
the more benevolence is evoked.' ' 

St. John was cosmopolitan in his conception of 



130 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

the Atonement, and fully understood this larger 
love which the world of to-day is beginning to ap- 
preciate. "He," and St. John would here have us 
see the larger Christ, ' 'is the Propitiation for our 
sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of 
the whole world." "He that saith he is in the 
light," be he Israelite or Anglo-Saxon, "and 
hateth his brother" of the Orient or elsewhere, 
"is in darkness even until now." "He that loveth 
his brother abideth in the light, and there is none 
occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth 
his brother," of any nation, or neighborhood, "is 
in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth 
not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath 
blinded his eyes." "He that loveth not his broth- 
er," in the immediate circle of his acquaintance as 
well as those afar off, ' 'abideth in death. ' 9 Not to 
loveistodie. "Whosoever hateth his brother," 
possibly on account of the frictions of life, or ex- 
cessive national prejudices, "is a murderer: and ye 
know that no murderer," not even the haughty 
Anglo-Saxon, "hath eternal life abiding in him." 
"Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that 
He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitia- 
tion for our sins." "And we have seen and do 
testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Sa- 
viour of the world." 

For what are men better than sheep or goats, 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, knowing- God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those that call them friend; 
For so the whole round world is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 

There is even yet a higher form of Christian 
love to be conserved, and that pertains to the love 
of God which is to be perfected in the soul. In 
the order of God, love ripens in the souls of men. 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 131 

First the bud of divine love, next the blossom, 
then the fruit, and finally the fruit ripened to per- 
fection. This is the divine ideal set for human 
love, and this is the experience of many devout 
spirits. There are degrees in heaven and there are 
degrees in Christian love and the highest degree in 
the love of God is love perfected. This love per- 
fected brings the soul into uninterrupted com- 
munion with God and into complete harmony with 
all heavenly things. This is a mystery to many, 
but not to all of God's children. The possible 
abuses which have sprung up about this thought 
of Christian love ripening to completion should not 
deter us from conserving the very best to be found 
in our Holy Religion. There is much art that is 
not art, and yet there is such a thing as art. There 
are coins which are not genuine, and yet there are 
many genuine coins. Many theories are false, but 
there are also true theories. A false theory about 
divine love perfected in the soul does not affect the 
real truth on this subject. It is unfortunate in this 
matter that the exact terms of truth have come 
into bad repute on account of extreme positions 
which have been taken by some. But overstat- 
ment must not be allowed to bring truth into dis- 
repute, and the dross of truth must not hide the 
pure gold of truth. Scripture misinterpreted is 
capable of right and true interpretation. Even a 
good definition of the love of God gives us a satis- 
factory outlook toward its ultimate completion. 
"The love of God," says Coleridge, "and therefore 
God himself who is love, religion strives to express 
by love, and measures its growth by the increase 
and activity of its love. For Christian love is the 
last and divinest birth, the harmony, unity, and 
god-like transfiguration of all the vital, intellectu- 



132 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

al, moral, and spiritual powers. Now it manifests 
itself as a sparkling and ebullient spring of well- 
doing in gifts and in labors; and now as a silent 
fountain of patience and longsuffering, the full- 
ness of which no hatred or persecution can exhaust 
or diminish; a more than conqueror in the persua- 
sion, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor 
principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any oth- 
er creature, shall be able to separate it from the 
love of God which is in Christ Jesus the Lord. 
From God's love through his Son, crucified for us 
from the beginning of the world, religion begins: 
and in love towards God and the creatures of God 
it hath its end and completion/ ' 

In conserving this highest form of God's love 
which looks to ultimate completion, the intellect 
has its place and its limitations. What of these 
limitations of the intellect? Dr. Joseph Parker 
has given us a good motto: "I will cling to the 
Love, where I cannot understand the thought." 
Love to Christ is to abide true, even if the intel- 
lect cannot climb to the same sublime height. 
11 When did love, " asks Dr. Parker, "ever turn 
back from the living Christ? The intellect has 
sometimes gone away, being imperfectly trained, 
being marred by voluntary or involuntary igno- 
rance, or being irritated by irrational impatience. 
Worldliness has gone away. 'Demas hath forsak- 
en me, having loved this present world;' respecta- 
bility sometimes turns away, afraid that the next 
stoop of condescension may be two lowly for its 
dignity: but when did love go away— real love, 
burning, passionate, sacrificial love? When was 
love offended? Love suffereth long, and is kind; 
love outliveth all things." 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 133 

"The night has a thousand eyes, 

And the day but one; 
Yet the light of a whole world dies 

With the setting sun. 

The mind has a thousand eyes, 

And the heart but one; 
Yet the light of a whole world dies 

When love is done." 

The burning sun of divine love in the heart is 
far more glorious than the faint rays of myriads of 
intellectual stars. The intellect must not get in 
the way of a great, growing, ripening, supreme 
love to God. This matter is of such vital impor- 
tance that Dr. Parker is again quoted on this point: 
"If we carry our crosses in Christ's spirit and ac- 
cording to the measure of Christ's will, we shall 
force our troubles beyond the dark point at which 
they would bind us down, and make those troubles 
contribute to the very satisfaction which they were 
meant to destroy. Intellect soon drops its crosses, 
love bears them on to the happy consummation/' 

It is the office of God's love to fulfill, and it 
fills all the Law of God wherein that Law was 
lacking in any thing. So in all ancient times love 
looked forward to completion in the new age to 
come- Could this law of completion be more 
beautifully expressed than by Browning! 

"Breathe but one breath 
Rose-beauty above, 
And all that was death 
Grows life, grows love, 
Grows love." 

God's love is infinite and when that love flows 
into our hearts it is embodied in the terms of hu- 
man imperfection, and as the soul grows, God's 
love comes to a larger place and a better growth. 
Mrs. Browning voices this thought when she says: 

"And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness 
Round our restlessness, His rest." 



134 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

One of the beauties about this subject of love 
ripening to completion is that it has been embod- 
ied and demonstrated in the life of Jesus. This 
one human being at least is an example to all men, 
and we are to pattern our lives after His; He is 
our pattern. We are not to forget that Our Lord 
was man as well as God, and that His humanity 
has been exalted to the highest ideal of love made 
manifest. ' 'Jesus Christ showed also complete 
love to God," says Dr. James Chapman, of Lon- 
don, "under its two forms of delight in Him and 
devotion to Him. We see Him as a boy of twelve 
years old in His Father's house, about his Father's 
business. Fellowship with His Father was the 
element in which He lived. It was His meat- 
something for which He was hungry, and which 
brought Him strength and joy— to do His Father's 
will. A the end He was reconciled to the cross 
because He saw in it this holy, loving will. 'He 
offered Himself without spot unto God.' If one of 
the objects of the atonement was to save men, 
another quite as important was to hallow the name 
of God by making it plain that in the forgiveness 
of sin the Divine holiness was not compromised. 
In the character of Jesus Christ is realized all that 
He demands in His law of love. His love showed 
itself, as love always does, in little things as in 
great. He had the warmest interest in men; He 
was accessible, sociable, enjoying the common 
forms of human intercourse. He came eating and 
drinking; partaking of this sacrament of friend- 
ship in the house of His disciples, of publicans and 
sinners, and even of Pharisees. There were no 
exclusions from His love; it embraced the poor, the 
simple, the suffering, and the sinful. He had the 
most tender sympathies with the lost sheep and 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 135 

the prodigal son. Any appearance of limitation in 
His regard was only the reaction of tenderness 
against the hard-hearted, the resentment of love 
against the loveless. He was touched with the 
need of every part of man's nature, and brought 
relief to them all— bread to the hungry, healing to 
the sick, hope to the outcast, and a gospel to the 
sinful. The story of His life is that 'He went 
about doing good. ' He offers forgiveness for all 
offenses committed against Himself, and keeps the 
hardest of His own laws, that at which His most 
loyal disciples have been wont to stumble, by pray- 
ing that His murderers might be forgiven. Final- 
ly, His love sustained the last and most indubitable 
of all tests — He laid down His life to save men. 
This warm and all-inclusive love for men springs 
out of His passion of love and devotion to God. In 
the view of Jesus Christ, the love of man has its 
root in love to God." 

St. John is the aged Apostle of ripening, per- 
fected, Christian love. It is the seemly thing that 
he should be the expounder of these high attain- 
ments in the love of God. His was a mellow age 
and the love of God wrought its maturest develop- 
ment in his heart and life. Martin Luther says of 
St. John's First Letter: "The main substance of 
this Epistle relates to Love." "Whoso keepeth 
His word, in him verily," says St. John, "is the 
love of God perfected." "If we love one an- 
other, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected 
in us." "God is love: and he that dwelleth in love 
dwelleth God, and God in him. Herein is our love 
made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day 
of judgment: because as He is, so are we in this 
world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love 
casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He 



136 CONSERVATION OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

that feareth is not made perfect in love." These 
utterances by St. John clearly indicate the divine- 
ly natural relations between the soul and God after 
ripened love has removed all needless dread of 
God's Presence. The redeemed son dwells in the 
house of his Father without fear of harm, and he 
sits at his Father's table, blessed with the approba- 
tion of his Father's smiles. This happy soul is 
now "at home" with God, both in time and eterni- 
ty. But for most poor mortals, 

"On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven, a perfect round." 



Summing up something of what has preceded, 
we see that we have a great national domain whose 
resources must be conserved, if we are to live in 
peace and plenty. Above these numerous and 
valuable resources is the vast realm of spiritual veri- 
ty, and these spiritual resources must be properly 
conserved, if the Church is to be enriched with all 
grace. Among the four Evangelists, 'one of them, 
St. John was providentially prepared to write the 
Spiritual Gospel, and to reveal spiritual truth. Ac- 
cordingly, he sees Divine Being in Christ Jesus, 
and exclaims, ' 'Behold the Spiritual Being in the 
son of Mary." For this reason the life that is to 
be most like Christ is to be a spiritual life. In the 
Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ is to be found 
the permanent basis for spirituality in the Church 
for all ages to come. This truth is to be reinforced 
by the revelation of the Holy Spirit in the inner 
consciousness of the soul, the Holy Spirit becoming 
the fountain of more intense spiritual life. Many 



AS TAUGHT BY ST. JOHN 137 

things make erosions on this spiritual life, such as 
worldliness, error, doubt, and enmity. Out of al 
these things, three things must be conserved at 
all costs, Truth, Faith, and Love. Truth is to 
nourish the soul, Faith is to give it wings, and 
Love is to ripen it for Heaven. All this includes 
the most vital things in St. John's Gospel, the 
things paramount in the Book of Revelation and 
the most essential things in his Letters. These 
truths lead on to the eternal consummation which 
St. John sees with the eye of a Spiritual Seer 
when he exclaims, "I beheld, and low! a great 
multitude which no man could number, of all na- 
tions and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood 
before the throne and before the Lamb. These 
are they which came out of great tribulation, and 
have washed their robes, and made them white in 
the Blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they be- 
fore the throne, and He that sitteth on the throne 
shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no 
more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the 
sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb 
which is in the midst of the throne shall feed 
them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of 
waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from 
their eyes." 



INDEX. 



( Figures refer to pages.) 



^)neas, 10. 

Abandoned Farms, 12. 
Agnosticism, 52, 53. 
Arnold, Matthew, 20. 
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 120. 
Anglo-Saxon Spirit, 126. 
Athanasius, 55. 
Atomic Faith, 91. 
Augustus, 112. 

Bacon, 65, 71, 73. 
Bible, The, 102. 
Browning, Robert, 19, 120, 
125, 126, 133. 
Browning, Mrs. E. B., 133. 
Bryant, William Cullen, 48, 
64, 106. 
Bushnell, Dr. Horace, 39. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 70. 
Cartwright, 79. 
Conservation of Essential 

Spiritual Elements, 65-76. 
Cambridge University, 98. 
Cerinthus, 22, 23, 26. 
Cicero, 8. 
Conservation of Faith, 

89-93. 
Chapman, Dr. James, 120, 
134, 135. 
Character, 68, 69, 70. 
Conservation of Faith in 

God, 95-104. 
Channing, 45. 
Chemistry of Truth, 91. 
Conservation of Natural 

Resources, 9-13. 
Christian Science, 81, 82. 
Clerk-Maxwell, 98. 
Conservation of the Doc- 
trine of the Divinity of 
Christ, 21-30. 
Coleridge, 14, 20, 48, 56, 72, 
75, 80, 81, 82, 131. 
Conservation of the Faith 
that Believes in the Final 
Overthrow of Evil, 

107-120 



Conservation of Christian 
Love, 121-135. 

Daniel, 20. 
Dale, Dr. R. W., 98. 
Day of Judgment, 35. 
Dr. Delitsch, 20. 
Divinity of Christ, 21-46. 
Dr. Christlieb, 69. 
Domitian, 18. 
Dr. Strauss, 23. 
Doubt, 61, 62. 
Dynamic Faith, 116. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 69. 
Eliot, George, 28. 
Ennius, 64. 
Erosion of Farms, 57. 
Euripides, 78. 

Faber, 106. 

Fairbairn, Dr. A. M., 94. 

Faith, 89. 

Farrar, Canon, 14, 16, 99, 

100. 
Forests, 11. 

Fractional Man, The,. 96. 
Froude, 120. 
Frothingham, Dr. O. B., 

102 

Gatun Dam, 22. 
Goethe, 14. 
Gore, Canon, 96. 

Hamilton, Alexander, 21. 
Half-truths and Wrong 

Conclusions, 79-86. 
Hall, President Charles 

Cuthbert, 123, 124, 126. 
Harnack, 123, 124. 
Hendrix, Bishop E. R., 

48, 54. 
Herder, 22. 
Holy Spirit, 52-55. 
Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wen- 
dell, 10, 11. 
Huxley, 96. 

Isaiah, 75, 112. 



Jefferson, Thomas, 21. 
Jesuits, 83, 84, 85. 
Junius, Francis, 27. 

Kant, Immanuel, 88, 120. 
Kepler, 98. 

La Place, 98. 
Leighton, 14. 
Liddon, Canon, 23, 25, 35, 

38, 39. 
Lincoln, President, 106. 
Logos, 23, 24, 25. 
Love Ripening, 131. 
Love, the Supreme Passion 
with .Jesus, 134, 135. 
Lucretius, 71. 
Luther, Martin. 69, 72, 73. 

Macaulay, 83, 84. 
Matheson, A. Scott, 94. 
Mathematics and Faith, 95. 
Mill, John Stuart, 29. 
Mines Exhausted, 13. 
Miracles, 101, 102. 
Mormonism, 81. 
Mozley, The Rev. Dr. J. B., 
92, 94, 101. 

Napoleon, 49, 55. 
Nero, 114, 115. 
Nerva, 18. 

Newman, Francis W., 35. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 98. 
Nicoll, Dr. W. Robertson, 
28, 40. 
Nitrogen, 66. 
Niobe of Nations, 119. 

Oil Wells, 13. 

Panama, 22. 

Parker, Dr. Joseph, 14, 27, 
29, 32, 43, 51, 59, 78, 85, 
99, 132, 133. 
Parker, Dr. Theodore, 41. 
Philo, 25. 
Phosphorus, 68. 
Pilate, 71. 

Pilgrim Fathers, 9, 10. 
Pinchot, Gifford, 12. 
Pierson, Dr. Arthur T., 128. 
Plato, 23, 25, 64, 110. 
Polycrates, 18. 
Pope, 75. 
Positive Philosophy, 98. 



Preface, 5, 6. 
Pre-existence, 44. 
Psychic Reserve, 91. 

Reason not the Whole Man, 
97. 
Regeneration, 52. 
Remnant, 112. 
Richter, 89, 90. 
Romanes, George John, 32, 
48, 62, 88, 96, 97. 
Rouseau, 29. 

Simplicius, 27. 

Self-deceptions in the In- 
tellect, 74, 75, 76. 

Spiritual Resources of the 
Church, 15. 

Summary of the Whole 

Book, 136, 137. 

St. Augustine, 25, 26, 82. 

St. Paul, 14, 74, 115. 

Spencer, Herbert, 53, 96. 

St. John, 15-19, 86, 117, 135. 

St. John's Conservation of 
the Doctrine of the Divin- 
ity of Christ, 33-46. 

Spiritual Erosion, 57-63. 

St. Peter, 41, 42. 

Sophocles, 64, 78, 88, 106. 

St. Philip, 42. 

Socrates, 69, 110. 

St. Thomas, 42, 90. 

Soils, 49, 50. 

Tacitus, 112, 114, 115. 
Taylor, Jeremy, 81. 
Temperance Reform, 110, 

111. 
Tennyson, 8, 90. 
Tertullian, 72. 
Theosophy, 100. 
Thompson, SirW., 98. 
Tiberius, 112, 113. 
Truth, 65. 

Upham, Dr. Francis W., 

106. 

Virgil, 8, 48, 64. 

Van Hise, President, 49, 

57, 65. 

Wordsworth, 6, 56, 64, 90. 
Whately, Archbishop, 71, 

74. 



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